God's Not Dead

Tonight, I watched God's Not Dead and was inspired by the following conversation from the movie:

Mark: You prayed and believed your whole life. Never done anything wrong. And here you are. You're the nicest person I know. I am the meanest. You have dementia. My life is perfect.. Explain that to me!

Mina & Mark's Mom: Sometimes the devil allows people to live a life free from trouble because he doesn't want them turning to God. Their sin is like a jail cell, except it is all nice and comfy and there doesn't seem to be any reason to leave. The door's wide open. Til one day, time runs out, and the cell door slams shut, and suddenly it's too late.

I have noticed that this seems to be a common struggle across believers and non-believers. There is this desire to explain why good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people. We want an explanation beyond free choice, evil or random occurrences of life events. We want meaning. If we are going to struggle, to face loss, while another person who is mean or even evil doesn't, we want to know why and we want the reason to be meaningful.

Yes, all of this is a part of God's plan, but there is still this desire to know why. As if we believe there was another way and God chose to have us suffer for no reason. This is why I love the mother's response in God's Not Dead. She could have talked about struggle and hardship as valuable to our relationship to God and others, but instead she flipped the tables and showed the other side. To not struggle, we become content in our lives, and miss the fact we are in a prison of our own making. When you look at it that way, who would you rather be?

Now I won't pretend to have all of the answers because I don't, I don't understand why God takes people

before they have lived a full life or why some people seem to attract hardship like a magnet, but I do know that each moment is a puzzle piece working together with all of the other moments to form God's perfect plan. To see the finished puzzle now would be divine, but if I can't, it doesn't change the fact "God is good, all the time. All the time, God is good."