Dear God,

How could you allow a searing hatred to destroy your people? I don’t understand…

People praying.

Your children talking to you. Your sons and daughters who could have been out to eat or watching TV or spending time with their families…………………..but instead were at church.

Because they love you.

Is this the reward for devotion?

How does this fit against a backdrop of perfect love?

Where were you?

What were you doing?

What will people think about you?

Even those of us who love you with our whole selves ask through hot tears and aching souls…

How could you?

I was there.  

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me, your rod and your staff, they comfort me. Psalm 23:4

Be assured, I was there.

In God, whose word I praise,
    in the Lord, whose word I praise—
 in God I trust and am not afraid.
    What can man do to me? Psalm 56:10-11

And I heard.

In my distress I called to the Lord;
    I cried to my God for help.
From his temple he heard my voice;
    my cry came before him, into his ears. Psalm 18:6

BUT WHY?

I know you don’t understand.

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts…

neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. Isaiah 55:8

“As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Isaiah 55:9

But what about our hurting souls?

Know this…

Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his faithful servants. Psalm 116:15

I have caught every tear.

    You keep track of all my sorrows.
    You have collected all my tears in your bottle.
    You have recorded each one in your book. Psalm 56:8

John says in 1 John 3:15 that if we harbor hatred in our hearts, we are murderers. Exactly the same as a young man who sits in a prayer meeting and then murders its participants. The same. The very same.

That’s not okay.

That’s not okay at all.