The Eternal Question

I help teach 6th grade CCD, which in our diocese studies the Bible. As such, we talk about alot of people who have had great tragedy in their lives. The question comes up over and over about why God allows evil, why He doesn't feed the hungry, why He doesn't make us all do good. The easy answers are that we have Free Will and that God works through us. Though the answers are easy to say, they are not so easy to understand. In Bible study we are reading the Acts of the Apostles and last night we read about the conversion of Saul of Tarsus (Paul). One of our discussion questions was "Why does God sometimes use periods of darkness to bring a person into a different and better period of life?" In our group we have a women who has been a widow for many years, another who was widowed this past year, a man who is struggling with raising an autistic child and another women who was struck with MS in her first year of med school. As I was listening to their stories I was struck by the image of a metal worker of old fashioning a sword. They would heat the metal, work it, and then cool it. This process would be repeated over and over. Each time the metal was heated and cooled, it became stronger, more resilient. Each time it was worked, it became finer, sharper. And I thought, that is what bad times do to us.