Q.
Is God “in control”?
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rescued that one boy? Yes. Otherwise, God screamed in pain with those boys
and their loved ones.Joshua Einsohn
Who is...
?
Joshua Einsohn
I have faced my own mortality and found it to be a lot
less spooky than conventional wisdom would indicate.A.
When tragedy strikes, many of us need to believe that there was a
reason for it. In order to deal with incomprehensible pain, there is a
need to think that maybe it’s all part of God’s plan and that we are
just unable to wrap our small, human brains around the Big Picture.
In When Bad Things Happen to Good People, Harold Kushner talks about
the tapestry theory, which basically says that if you looked at the back of a
tapestry, it would seem to be a disorganized mess—many different colors of
threads, some of which weave on for a long time and some of which are cut
short and knotted off. This is how we see the world because we are too small
to see how each small piece fi ts into a larger work of art.
However, when you turn the tapestry over, it is beautiful and perfect and
every thread has come together to make a beautiful work of art. This is how
God sees us.
Having lost friends to homicide, suicide, drug overdoses, and so on, I
admit that I want to take comfort in that image—that their death only seemed
“too soon” to me. But part of me still feels that it’s a little mean and conde-
scending. Why not make us capable of understanding the Big Picture so that
our pain can be soothed?
So I choose to believe that since we can’t know the answers, it is up to
us to try to prevent tragedy from happening whenever possible and to give
support when suffering happens... and hope that someday maybe we will be
able to see and understand why.