Whenever a tragedy occurs, we sometimes hear: “What a terrible, or cruel thing! If there were a God, He would never have let anything so terrible happen.” We humans can find many reasons to question the existence of God. A few will actu- ally dwell on such events to renew and strengthen their stand. It appears that they are actually looking for evidence and reason not to believe. Of course, if we can somehow rationalize that there is no God, then anything that we do in life is OK! No God, no penalty. To them, the commandments must have been devised by man, and who’s afraid of man? The Connecticut grade school tragedy was such an event. The same words were heard almost as if people parroted them: “If there is a God, how could he have let such a terrible thing happen?” Terrible things happen as part of our test, and if/when we survive our earthly tests, we will be stronger, and we will move on with our lives and the blessing of having experiencing living on this beautiful earth. If God interfered in our lives to the point that no tragedy could happen to us, we would become invalids and totally dependent on the Father to protect and provide for us. Where there is no opposition, there is no life, no joy. We were blessed with an opportunity to experience earth life as part of our eternal and ongoing growth experience. We had already successfully experienced our pre-earth test, and there were probably some very difficult challenges there as well, one of which was the war with Satan and his angels. Before coming here, God (our Father) warned us about many of the challenges we would face, many of them tragic events that would or could directly affect our close and much-loved family members.
Like most everything else, tragic events are only supposed to happen to the other guy, the other family. They won’t happen to me or my family. When it does, we may become devastated and inclined to say, “There is no God. If there were a God, He would never have let anything like this happen to me, my family, etc.
Many of the tragic and terrible things that happen to us happen because we challenged fate. We sometimes take stupid chances, or we knew better, but we were confident in our ability to do something risky but safely. We may experience a devastating illness because we did not eat properly or take care of ourselves, health wise. We were wrong! In some cases, it wasn’t us or a member of our family that was doing something risky; it was another. We may never see it coming. A truck driver falls asleep on the road, and we, or a family member, are inadvertently in the wrong place at the right time and will suffer the consequences. Yes, it was a tragedy, and they happen every day to someone, to some family, somewhere. We can experience our world and enjoy it or we can confine ourselves to our homes.
If we never ventured out, we might be safe. We wouldn’t have to worry about a truck driver falling asleep. To confine ourselves to avoid possible tragedies would itself be a tragedy, for we may as well have remained in our pre-earth state.
We might ask, “Well, why doesn’t God intervene and protect us from these tragedies?” This earth life and experience is our test, not His. We must do our best to be faithful and maneuver through earth’s obstacles, and if we come out at the end mature and with only minor blemishes, we will be well rewarded. That is not to say that God cannot and will not intervene, but He will only do so if there is a just cause, and the prayers of the faithful were sent heavenward. If God did intervene in our lives, on a regular basis, it would negate our agency. We would be no more mature at the end of this earth experience than had we remained in our mother’s womb. We must be strong and determined to take all and every experience as part of our education, no matter how painful. Nephi of old exclaimed, “O the pain, and the anguish of my soul for the loss of the slain of my people! For I, Nephi, have seen it, and it well nigh consumeth me before the presence of the Lord; but I must cry unto my God: Thy ways are just.” (2 Nephi 26:7) Our experience here requires that there be opposition in all thing. Tragedies are in opposition to God’s will, and His desire for us. We came here knowing that they were a possibility, and we chose to come anyway. Therefore, a tragedy should only be affirmation to us that Satan exists—not whether our God exists.