Does God Cry?

The recent earthquake and tsunamis in Japan with a horrific death toll of possibly ten of thousands should break our hearts and move us to act, to give and to help. For Christians who believe in an omnipotent good God, however, it may also shake our faith. The problem of evil and suffering is a centuries-old philosophical conundrum. It is bad enough to contemplate human-made horrors like 9/11, human trafficking, the Holocaust or the atrocities of war but how do we reconcile natural disasters – such as Japan now, New Zealand’s earthquake weeks prior, the 2010 Pakistan floods, the 2010 Haiti and Chile earthquakes, the 2005 Hurricane Katrina, the 2004 Asian tsunamis, the list goes on – with the belief that a good God is in control? I confess I grapple with this problem.