It's not God's will...

A short while ago a devout Christian with whom I worked came to comfort me at the loss of my brother.

She's the genuine article, a real person of faith who tries to make it matter in a very confusing world, but something she said took me back. "It's going to be alright" she said "It was God's will". Now I know she meant well but...

No, it was not God's will!

It was not the desire of God's heart that my brother die in a hotel room in Los Angeles. Or that anyone for that matter suffers and dies. If anything it is Satan's desire, with each death and each pain being a way to stick a diabolical finger, as it were, in God's eye.

Yes, but God could have prevented it!

And the answer is yes, God could have, and I don't understand why providence chose this time and place and way for my brother's earthly life to end. I may never. And right now its everything I can do to hold on to the idea of a plan and a guidance to all of this, a meaning that's real but just escapes me at the moment. I trust it all makes sense to my brother already yet it's only honest to say if any belief or faith is present in this time its not rooted in what I see or feel.

Remarkably, in all of this I know in a place beyond my emotions and my logic that God is still working to make all things new and somehow this dreadful thing, this epitome of all that is broken and wrong with humanity, has a place in it all. That is God's will, and somehow my brother leaving this life is part of it.

It makes no sense at all but at the same time it seems very true.