Faith when Faced with Mortality

My nights were restless for the space of three days.  During this time I battled an oppression of the mind as I had never before.  On rare occasions, before my marriage, I had battled mild depression; but, this was entirely different.  At twenty-six still untouched by death my mind hurtled me toward thoughts of mortality.  I lost my wife, my brothers, my parents, essentially anyone with meaning to me faced disease and death.  These night terrors followed me through the days as well, and I begin to wonder why a sovereign God would allow such things.  Wasn’t He powerful enough to save everyone?  Couldn’t He have stopped sin from entering the world?  My belief, in who God is, answered back with an emphatic yes to both queries.  Then why does God allow the continuation of sin and its consequences?  I searched the writings of theologians and found only the answers I had previously heard.  The struggle continued until Sunday morning.  As I entered service I hoped for a divine revelation that would answer once and for all this profound question.  When service ended it was without divine revelation, but the uneasiness that had settled in my mind was healed.  The question remained but peace co-existed with it.  I continued my search for answers on Monday.  I looked both to scripture and theologians.  The answers were the same as my last search, but this time I found peace in them.  I knew He could have stopped sin, but I also understood that somewhere in the pain of our existence God was working a good unimaginable to me.  I knew this because the Bible told me this through the evil which befell Joseph but saved unknown thousands and most gloriously through the evil that befell the Son of Man.  It was on this Earth that God experienced the loss of a friend as Man.  It was on this Earth that God bore the sufferings due to us and poured out His blood for our eternal life.  This gift of love so overshadowed the evil of this world that my restless mind calmed and found solace in scripture:

And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to [his] purpose. (Romans 8:28 KJV)

When the call came at three AM on Wednesday morning from the sobbing wife of my best friend I was prepared.  The few days of struggling with my faith in the midst of imagined pain had prepared me to deal with her tearful words: “He went into cardiac arrest.  It doesn’t look good.”  Both my wife and I fell to our knees.  We fell before Him because we knew all things work to a purpose we cannot understand, even death.  We prayed because we knew the hands that held my friend’s life were the same hands that made the lame walk, made the dumb speak, made the blind see, and made the dead rise.  They were the same hands that had bore the wages of sin and given hope of eternal life, and they were the hands that would comfort us if the unthinkable occurred.  By the grace of God my friend’s life was spared, and he is now walking down the halls of the hospital undergoing rehab.  I still have no divine revelations regarding the mysteries of God in the area of suffering and death, but I do know that without His hands there is no purpose to any of it.