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If God really exists, why is the world such a mess?
It’s easy to document that on any given day people all over the planet awaken to wars, famines, and corruption.
Why doesn’t God, with one sweep of his hand, wipe the slate clean?
No wonder “the problem of pain” is the number one objection to the claims of Christianity.
In his book Faith and Doubt, John Ortberg tells about a friend named Sheryl who went to a salon to have her nails manicured.
As conversations tend to evolve in such places, Sheryl and her stylist landed on one subject after another to pass the time.
Eventually they touched on God. That’s when the beautician said, “I don’t believe that God exists.”
“’Why do you say that?’ asked Sheryl. As someone afflicted with MS, she’s invested a considerable amount of time pondering the reality of God’s presence and care.
“’Well, you just have to go out on the street to realize God doesn’t exist,” the beautician began. “Tell me, if God exists, would there be so many sick people? Would there be abandoned children? If God existed, there would be neither suffering nor pain. I can’t imagine loving a God who could allow all these things.”
Sheryl had no desire to start an argument. She sat quietly as the beautician finished her nails, then left the shop.
Ortberg writes, “Just after she left the beauty shop, she saw a woman in the street with long, stringy, dirty hair. She looked filthy and unkempt. Sheryl turned, entered the beauty shop again, and said to the beautician, ‘You know what? Beauticians do not exist.’
“’How can you say that?’ asked the surprised beautician. ‘I am here. I just worked on you. I exist.’
‘No,’ Sheryl exclaimed, ‘beauticians do not exist, because if they did, there would be no people with dirty, long hair and appearing very unkempt like that woman outside!’
“’Ah, but beauticians do exist,’ she answered. ‘The problem is that people do not come to me.’”
Exactly.
What can we say about the fact that God seems so, well, invisible so much of the time?
The surprising and jarring truth is that God stands back because he yearns to be sought. As Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened” (Matthew 7:7-8).
But that’s not all.
God also yearns to recruit us to be his hands and feet in a broken world.
We are the ones, acting on his behalf, who are called to bring healing to those who suffer and transformation to those without hope.
Such acts of kindness and grace not only help others see God’s face.
They inevitably display a kind of beauty that no salon will ever be able to provide.