Today’s Prayer to Passage will be from the book “When Bad Things Happen to Good People” by Harold Kushner.

Today I pray, “Dear God, When we trust and know that everything is good while it is happening, we only see things as bad because we have evolved enough to recognize something as bad, yet we have not evolved across time to see how and why it contributes, in part, to a collective good — even if this appreciation evolution is 13 billion years away. Thank You for this. Amen.”

Following my prayer, I held the closed book in my hands and opened it to this passage:

“If that were God’s plan, it’s a bad bargain; I don’t want to have to deal with a God like that…My sense is God and I came to an accommodation with each other a couple of decades ago, where he’s gotten used to the things that I’m not capable of and I’ve come to terms with things he’s not capable of…and we care very much about each other.”
—HAROLD KUSHNER

Whew. Two decades is much more exciting than 13 billion years. So here we are. Let’s take a look at how we got here. Let’s look at bad things in 1996.

People died. Married couples filed for divorce. Divorces included Nelson Mandela as well as Princess Diana. People were diagnosed with illnesses. People were abused. People committed suicide. Nuclear tests were performed. Airplanes crashed. People suffered nervous breakdowns. There was a school shooting in a Kindergarten classroom. Earthquakes caused deaths of people. Mad Cow Disease was reported to be infectious. Climbers were killed on Mount Everest. A pipe bomb killed one person and injured more than 100 at the Atlanta Olympics. People were murdered. And bad things. And bad things. And bad… things.

It’s a strange paradox. 13 billion years ago, none of these things happened. If a tree falls in a 13-billion-year-old forest, and a humanity is there to read about it, hear about it, see it… we may just call it bad. And now, a moment of silence and self-reflection surrounding this.

Amen.