Have you ever asked yourself that question? I remember the first time I did. It was also the first time my daughter went missing. The youngest child, Jenn was born indomitable—a force of nature. I can’t say I wasn’t prepared for that. My first born literally never sat still, always had places to go! People to see! But I had been lulled into complacency by my middle child—whom we later came to view as “the calm between two storms.”
I had forgotten what a not-yet-three-year old could and would do when she felt the next urge to conquer the world. This—the first time—she escaped through the screen door while I was cooking dinner. When I couldn’t find her, I raced out of the house, calling her name at the top of my lungs but to no avail. She wasn’t at the house on either side of us—nor at those two or three doors’ down where some of her brothers’ friends lived, nor any of the houses whose occupants we knew.
In tears, I started driving up and down the streets of our neighborhood, praying my heart out and asking, “Why Me? Why did someone have to take my little girl?” Then I had to stop dead in my tracks—figuratively, if not literally. I had just published a series of magazine articles in various publications about the kidnapping of a little girl who attended a co-op preschool in our county’s parent-participation-nursery-school organization (of which I was president). The three-year-old child was never found.
Of course I believed in the power of prayer, but I also had to remind myself that God doesn’t promise any of us a rose garden. Being a faithful Christian didn’t garner me a get-out-of-losing-a-child free card. “Who do I think I am?” became my new question. “Bad things happen to good people all the time. Why not me?”
In my childhood, my mother went to great lengths to make sure that every amount or number of anything—good or bad—was divided equally among the three of us kids. While maybe silencing my complaints as a child, this policy has not served me as an adult. It led me to believe that life would be fair—or at least that my life would be equal to those of my two siblings.
Newsflash to no one: In reality life is not fair.
How could it be—when bad things happen to good people (and the converse)? And especially when some good people suffer considerably more than others.
One such person is my friend who valiantly raised a child with special needs in spite of her abusive husband, who suffered through treatments for three different cancers, and whose son committed suicide.
Then there’s the young wife and mother struggling to reconcile with her law-enforcement husband whose work in the division of crimes against children had left him burned out and beaten down. At the same time, she was diagnosed with leukemia and in the midst of such a devastating challenge, she was raped during a home invasion. As I write this, she is in the ICU with COVID-19.
Finally, consider the friend from college whose father committed suicide, whose influential stepfather murdered her mother (and convinced local authorities to call it a suicide), who has lived for decades with a husband with severe OCD, who was abducted from a grocery-store parking lot and raped in front of her three-year old son, and whose latest tragedy was the suicide of that son.
If these events had happened to me, I probably couldn’t even lift my head off the pillow in the morning. But these amazing women live each day as shining examples of Christ to everyone around them.
Again, life isn’t fair. But God is, and His fairness and justice will reign supreme when we are together with Him in heaven.
In the meantime, God has built into every trial and tragedy a way to help us become better rather than bitter. In fact, when we turn to God and seek the opportunities to serve that He provides in the midst of our sufferings, He rewards us with a greater sense of His presence than we have ever felt before.
Recently, I learned that a wonderful woman I met at a writers’ conference years ago is in hospice–where I thought I’d be by next year. And so today I sit on the back end of the “Why not me?” question — with a heavy dose of survivor’s guilt. Why did God heal me and not her?
And as I pray for her and her family—the way I pray every day for all the women whom I just described—I end where I began:
Have you ever asked yourself, “Why not me?” If so, please comment about it below.