More on ''why do the innocent suffer?''

I really need to come back to this, because it really is one of the hard questions of our faith, of my personal faith. If there is or ever has been someone who has gone through life with NO loss, NO fear, NO struggle, NO pain, none if it - well, I've never heard of it. And nobody gets out of here alive. Pain and death are, at the end of it, the common denominator of all of mankind. We experience it personally, we see it around us if we have eyes to see and a heart to perceive.

Yet, as believers, we know that God is God Almighty, that He really did create all that we see from nothing; we believe, we know, that He is good to an extent that we can't really understand; we believe that He knows us more completely than we know ourselves; and we believe that He loves us. We believe all of this. And, at the same time, we see all the pain and loss.

How do we reconcile this?

This has been a problem for believers since the time of Job, and it is no accident, perhaps, that Job may be the very first book of the Bible to have been written down, possibly even before the time of Moses. Or so some have told me - I have no idea but it is true that the question is as old as the time of Enoch at least.

I came across a thing that was written some years ago by Dr. Gerald Mann, pastor of Riverbend Baptist Church in Texas, famous for his short, to the point, sermons that stressed the phrase ''you can begin again''. Here is a link to his response to the question. It answers it perhaps as well as a human being can, certainly better than I can or have.
''The Question God Hears Most"

I am an engineer by trade and by inclination. Finding the answers to difficult questions is one of the things that I do and frankly enjoy doing. But there are questions and there are questions. I can find a way to operate your factory more efficiently, or find an answer to a heat transfer problem. but I have no answers to the man whose wife died suddenly and wants to know why. I can often find the what. The ''why'' is often out of my field. That is the province of God. I see no reason to believe that He is displeased when we cry out to Him, when we pour out our heart, when we bring Him our hurts. But we have to realize that we may not get an answer, not one that we will recognize as one. We can be hurt, we can be angry at the situation, we may weep and mourn. When all else is said, we still have to hang on to Him, and to trust Him, to trust His nature. Job said, '' if he slay me, still will I trust Him''. And sometimes there just is no alternative but to realize that His nature is not our nature. And just hang on.