evil and god's justice

I realize as fully as anyone else here that kids are not innocent in the sense of being sinless. I remember what it was like to be a kid. I remember the taunts of other children all the way through high school. I remember how appealing suicide looked through the long and lonely years of middle school, and I recall all too vividly that I was no better than the other kids, because of the way I often bullied Matt Alsop when we were in elementary school. You want me to acknowledge that children are fallen creatures? I acknowledge it; hell, I'd be an idiot not to. My daughter's only 3 years old and she's already got a lot of the makings of a bully when it comes to her foster brother.

But nothing -- NOTHING -- justifies what I've seen some kids suffer. What sense does it make for a 5-year-old girl to be ripped out of her front yard by a complete stranger and raped and killed? What sin did she commit that brought her such a hideous fate? What did the Yates children do to deserve being drowned in the bathtub by their own mother? These are senseless crimes, they serve no purpose and they all altogether evil.

I don't make any argument against my own suffering. Like Dostoevsky says through the mouth of Ivan Karamazov, I've sinned. I'm an adult. I've had 32 years now to pile sin upon sin, and when those sins come home to roost with all their corruption, I have no right to complain. Nor do I have a right to complain about the suffering that comes from doing the right thing -- that's a choice I made, and in experiencing the pain and heartache that comes with following Christ, I'm able to share in his sufferings and he in mine.

But tell me this: What choice did Samantha make? What decision has Isaac made that Child Protection Services -- fully acknowledging that his parents have not improved in the least and still are going to neglect him in the same manner that has left him woefully behind developmentally -- is going to be thrown back to the wolves in less than three months? What great and ineffable purpose of God is served by the suffering of a single child for the sins his parents have committed?

I can't think of any. What is going on to kids like Isaac is evil, plain and simple. His parents are too self-absorbed to care for their children in anything beyond giving them food and baths, the state acknowledges that, and yet the kids are headed back. The destruction of a child is EVIL. When that destruction occurs at the hands of the people who are charged with the child's care and well-being, it is so foul I don't know the words to describe it.

The entire situation is perverted, from the way his mother sacrifices her children for her own fantasy life and pride, to the way their father knows what a good parent is but refuses to act like one, to the way the state is going to stand blithely by and let it happen again. For God's sake, they took the kids away last year because they were being neglected, and now they're going to toss them back into that same exact situation.

This is wrong, plain and simple, and if I'm sinful and can see that and would do something to stop it if I could, then why the hell can't God see it and do something about it? How does Isaac and his sister's abandonment to a home where they are valued only because of what their existence says about their mother rather than because of their instrinsic worth, glorify him?

Maybe, as Ivan Karamazov says, on the Last Day, it'll all be made clear and we'll see there was some purpose to it. As far as I'm concerned right now, I agree with his other contention, that that's bullshit. I can't rise up and cry "Just and true are your ways" when Isaac has to suffer so much right now with no remedy. Justice delayed until we all have ice cream on gold plates is no justice at all.

If God needs to build his glory on the suffering of children in this manner, then I honestly don't think I know him anywhere near as well as I thought I did. And if you don't see a problem with this situation, then I don't know you either.