W-H-Y??????

Why?   That word has to be the single most empowering and destructive word in the English language.   I've been asking it a lot lately, maybe you can relate.

Why did my little girl have cancer?   Why did I lose my mommy three weeks after my daughter's diagnosis?  Why did God let these things happen?  The truth is those questions are destructive,   I will never know why my daughter ever had to endure having her spine lifted up out of her spinal cord to remove the tumor that was crowding the nerves and causing her to not be able to move her fingers.  I will never know why my mom battled an illness for years and yet the time in my life when I needed her the most, was the time God called her home.  I do know that God is good though and that's all I have.  How do I know that... it is simple.  Another series of why questions that I can't answer, but point to the goodness of God.   

The tumor my daughter had was located in such a place where the nerves are located that move her fingers, but also regulate her heart rate and respiration.  Why did she have this tumor?  Who knows?   But, why did it impact only her fingers when it could have easily taken her life before we even knew that beast was inside her tiny body?  The goodness of God.   Even in the storm of cancer, he spared her life.   

As for mom, she was with me when I stared in the face of the possibility of losing my baby girl.   She held onto me during those moments because of the goodness of God.   When her temperature began to spike and I had to leave Indiana to travel six hours to be with my mom before she passed, he heard our prayers.  You see, mom and I were very close.  I couldn't imagine not being with her when she took her last breath and yet I had to leave behind a little girl who just got home from the hospital and couldn't even take a shower without me yet to go be with mom.  Mom's temperature spiked up to 108 degrees, but she held on--- I believe God honored her mother's cry and my daughter's plea to let me be with her those last moments-- because of His goodness.   

So you see, why is a great question.  We may just be designed to ask it more than anything else for it is the why that propels our learning forward.  Sometimes we don't have the answer to the why we want, but when we re-frame the question we always get an answer.  Sometimes the answer is simply because the world is a fallen place, but God still loves me.  

The question I ask myself now is....why aren't I "satisfied" with that answer alone.  Until it is... the journey continues.