By Brian Woolery – Asia/Pacific Regional Youth Coordinator

I lived in the Philippines for three years while working with NYI and attending seminary.  I loved the Philippines, and it was here that our son Justin was born.  When Justin was just an infant we had a Filipina lady, Janet, babysit him once a week.  Janet began to bring her youngest child, EJ, who was five.  It was amazing, because EJ and Justin became great friends.  Even though Justin was only a few months old, he knew when EJ was there and would always begin to bounce around and laugh.  And even though EJ was five years old, he could spend the whole day playing hide-and-seek with Justin (EJ did both the hiding and the seeking!), and pushing Justin around in his little rolling chair.   But one day EJ came to the house with a bad cold.  We thought he would get better but it quickly got worse, and he had to go to the hospital.  A week later EJ died of diphtheria.

We were all shocked.  How could a 5-year old die so quickly?  The questions and the pain rolled together like a wave. He had had an immunization, but there was a possibility that because of government corruption it had been watered it down, making it less effective.  Janet and her family did not have the money to put him in a good hospital that could have saved his life.  Why does a 5-year old die of a preventable disease?  And why do girls in Thailand get sold into a life of slavery?  Why do earthquakes in the Indian Ocean cause tidal waves which destroy whole cities?  Why do thousands of Japanese youth commit suicide each year?  Why is there pain?  Why is there suffering?  Why?

This is not the way our world is supposed to be.  Every human on the planet naturally knows this.  This is why people of all faiths and all cultures cry out “Why?!” And this is not the way God intended our world to be.  In Genesis we read when God finished the hard and fulfilling work of creating our universe, he stood back to look at it and said it was ‘very good.’  But the decision of Adam and Eve to choose their own way caused a deep break to happen, not just in humans but in all creation.  Even creation is groaning that the wrong be made right.   And God’s heart and purpose are the same, to confront and overcome evil with good.

As youth, it’s a hard question to wrestle with.  If God has all the power, why doesn't he just stop evil? We see God’s answer best in Jesus. Jesus, God’s own son, showed in his life that he confronted the evil of the demon-possessed man; confronted the brokenness of the woman caught in adultery; confronted the hopelessness of the man crippled from birth; confronted the dysfunction of Matthew, the price-gouging tax collector; confronted the sorrow of losing his cousin John the Baptist and his friend Lazarus; and confronted the confusion and frustration of the disciples.  Jesus also suffered and ultimately died because of sin and evil.

But Jesus was not a sorrowful martyr.  He was connected to his Father who was power, and hope, and light, and life!  The demon-possessed was freed; the woman caught in adultery was spared, and many believe she was transformed and began to follow Jesus; Matthew gave up his lifestyle; the man crippled from birth walked again; and ultimately God raised Jesus from the dead, showing that evil does not win over good!  The truth is that God is always working, always confronting evil and always inviting us to be a part of doing  the same.

Paul was a guy who had his impressive list of sufferings, if you want to compare.  But something about Jesus Christ had so captured him that he wrote in Romans 8:18, “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.”  You see, Paul was driven by the hope of the power of God to overcome all evil.  Paul allowed his life to be caught in the river of God’s spirit. He recognized that evil causes suffering, and that like Jesus, overcoming evil with good involved being willing to also experience pain and suffering.

As Janet and her family cried and grieved over the death of little EJ, and as my wife Julie and I did also, I recognized here was an evil that I myself could not overcome.  I felt helpless, confused, angry, frustrated, and hurt.  But then Jesus began to remind me that He also experienced all of these same things.  He understood.  He reminded me of what Paul said later in Roman 8, “In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness.  We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.  And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God’s will.”  (Rom 8:26-27).  I realized that I was not alone, and even though I did not know what to pray, God understood and was working in the middle of this whole tragic situation.  And where God is at work, there is light, and there is hope, even in the middle of what feels like a hopeless and never-ending night.

The God of hope began to give me hope in the middle of all that was going on and began to show me how I could be praying for and supporting EJ’s parents, Janet and Ernesto, and his sister.  God began to help me find ways to love them with the love of Jesus Christ.  It’s like Paul later said, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose” (Rom 8:28).  Even in the middle of the death of a 5-year old boy, he was ready to use me to bring about good, if I would be obedient.

Unfortunately, evil will continue to exist until God creates a new heaven and earth, but here in the time between we are not helpless victims of it, but rather are more than conquerors by the same power that raised Jesus from the dead!  If we are willing to pray, God will show each of us individually and collectively where he is at work and how he is calling us to be involved in confronting and overcoming evil with good.