Without freedom, there is no love.  Without choice, there is no freedom.  The choices we are offered?  Either follow the light or burrow into the darkness of self-will. 

In this existence, liberty will be ever interconnected with the unfathomable pain that attends free human agency and the natural consequences of severing the polished mirrors of our lives from our illuminating source.  We hear this same plaintive cry following every monstrous evil. Where was God in the massacre?  In truth, He has been where he has always been: at the Doors of Men's hearts knocking to gain entrance.  He could kick the door in, I suppose, and crush evil before it had formed its nasty intent, but that is not the universe He meditated upon in love and wisdom to create.  But if he did, and since it is His ballgame, what makes you so certain it would not be your own brittle house that came crashing down around you?

We really should get this straight.  Viewing evil in the light of our own limited carnal perspective is thoroughly myopic, because humans misjudge themselves as the esteemed center of the universe.  If this were true, then veritably there is no human hope for anything other than a fleeting animal happiness; and every massacre, every tsunami, every suffering soul who has been wracked by cancer or watched their loved one die of it is an existential absurdity.  We should not even ascribe meaning to this suffering because in an anthropocentric universe, life as we live it has no real meaning and we all collectively suffer in our sickness unto death as pathetic creatures in some black comedy.

The fact that we as a race almost to a man resist such a bleak characterization of life is owing to the moral law of nature that God has laid upon our hearts.  Without this shadow of a divine consciousness we should never question our fates and therein shed no more tears than a lizard does upon devouring her own eggs.  It is not in Darwinian existential grappling that we fulfill and transcend our humanity. It is, however, in reconciling the pain and anguish we experience as humans with that objective moral consciousness that allows the transmutation of our suffering as a means to awaken us from that carnal slumber.

God, in the truest and broadest sense has never slain anyone or allowed anyone in the history of the world to perish.  Since we as eternal beings merely step through the door of one tiny room into the halls of a grand Pavilion that proceeds on into infinity, it can never be said that the Father of Lights lost a single precious child to the black void of the outer darkness.  This being said, the sufferings of we who are left behind and who must cope with these searing and gnawing losses are inextricably bound to the mysteries of faith, redemption, and grace -- all of which coalesce and become intelligible in the paradox of the Cross.  Nothing beautiful that has ever been made has become so without a cost, and a sovereign God, as C.S. Lewis writes, uses pain and suffering as megaphones to rouse a deafened world. In pain and virtue God fashions men.  There is no other way in a world that has been destined to be free.

Men whose hearts become jaundiced and blackened through the absurdity of a nihilistic existence wrapped around a humanistic center are indeed the most wretched of God's creatures.  As tragic beings who refuse to believe in joy, they find a perverse comfort in the distorted reflection of their own will-little children hiding in a darkened closet with eyes tightly shut.  As darkness descends upon a saddened little village and tears fall as profusely as a winter's rain, please understand that there is more to the universe than unawakened selves will ever know. As the dam bursts and the broken veneer of our pain jars loose our vanities, only then can we grasp the wisdom that we are loved more than all reason and measure by the overflowing heart of a Great and Suffering King.