Some days, the news seems too much to bear. Yet another tsunami or earthquake or flood or fire or war atrocity. One more gun-toting madman stalking young people in idyllic Norway or moviegoers in Colorado or schoolchildren in Newtown, Connecticut. We turn off the news only to get a phone call about expectant parents with a stillborn baby, or a loved one whose cancer has returned. Really, God? we ask. This again? If we have faith in God, it gets shaken to the core. What was God doing in the moment when that tragedy could have been prevented? If we can't trust God to keep our children safe or our loved ones from dying in agony, what can we trust God for? It is the question that never goes away. The Question is highlighted in Newtown, Connecticut, where at the scene of the elementary school murders an ambulance driver said, 'All of us on the fire and ambulance corps are volunteers. I've seen some awful things, but we don't train for something like this---nobody does.' The Question raises its head again in Japan where a giant tsunami raced at a speed of 500 miles per hour toward shore and in the crushing force of its wave buckled roads, cracked bridges, and collapsed buildings. And 16,000 people died. But in a miraculous turn, an eighty-year-old grandmother and her teenage son were saved after nine days. In one more part of the world Yancey looks at the Question in the former Yugoslavia, in the city of Sarajevo, where a bloody civil war erupted and snipers shot and killed 11,000 countrymen, some women and children. One woman commented, 'Winters were the worst. Without electricity we had no heat. I had a newborn baby, born in the midst of that hell. We chopped heirloom furniture with an axe.' But then part of an answer came to the question. 'On Christmas a neighbor brought me a priceless gift, a root system of a tree. He was a Muslim, didn't even celebrate Christmas, yet he sacrificed to keep us warm.' In his classic book Where Is God When It Hurts, Philip Yancey gave us permission to doubt, reasons not to abandon faith, and practical ways to reach out to hurting people. Now, in The Question That Never Goes Away, Yancey addresses the challenges to faith of extraordinary pain, random suffering, and the apparent uselessness of belief in a loving God who won't save us from our worst fears coming true. There are reasons to ask, once again, the question that never goes away. . . .
