There are many things in life that are terribly unfair but when I started working on this post I remembered something I wrote along this lines several years ago. I looked for a particular quote, then decided I just needed to re-post the entire thing. So here it is, "If Only I Were God."
I recently read "I'll Watch the Moon" by Ann Tatlock. It was an amazing read! Here is the book description:
When polio stalked Minnesota in 1948, fear was every mother’s constant companion. Young Nova Tierney and her older brother, Dewey, live a mostly idyllic life despite sharing living space with a motley assortment of tenants at the boarding house run by their Aunt Dortha and mother, Catherine. Dewey, nicknamed “Galileo” for his love of astronomy, dreams of some day walking on the moon, and he and Nova spend many happy hours looking at the night sky together in their backyard. When Dewey is hospitalized with polio, Nova promises to watch the moon for him (thus the title) until he is well. But will he recover? In her bitterness over a childhood secret, her late husband’s infidelity and her son’s desperate illness, his mother turns her back on God. “Sometimes, I wonder how we all go on living,” she muses. Hope begins to return when she strikes up a friendship with boarder and Auschwitz survivor Josef Karski.I didn't know much about the polio epidemic, being born after the vaccine, but it was one of the most dreaded childhood diseases of the 20th century. People who were finally getting their lives back after WW II, were now facing a dreaded disease. While Dewey is in the hospital, his mother has many conversations with Josef. She questions how he can go on believing and trusting in God when his entire family was destroyed during the war and he spent years in a concentration camp. Josef tells her a story that he heard while in Auschwitz. He questioned if God had turned His back on him. A Jewish rabbi shared this story with him:
A Jewish rabbi was standing high on a hill with a couple of his students, looking down at the town where his school was. Suddenly a group of Cossacks on horseback attacked the town. As he saw many of his students, along with the men, women, and children of the town being slaughtered, the rabbi looked up to heaven and said, "Oh, if only I were God." One of his students said with astonishment,"But, Master, if you were God, what would you do differently?" To which the rabbi replied, "If I were God I would do nothing differently. If I were God, I would understand."We often hear people say, "If I were God, I would..." or "How can a God of love allow such?" But we are not God. We can never fully understand His ways. Josef concluded his story to Catherine with this:
There is so much of suffering that I will never even begin to understand. But I am content in believing that I don't have to understand why the story unravels the way it does so long as I know that in the end everything will be all right.I've been thinking about my brother Rod a lot lately. Really missing him! I could spend the rest of my life saying, "if only I were God..." But in the end, everything really did turn out all right for Rod. He left this life, with all its pain and sorrow, and received a crown of life. If I were God, why would I change that?
