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Question 46

A few years back I lost the woman I loved around Christmas time due to a brutal attack in front of me in South Africa. As you recall at one stage I even contemplated becoming a monk and I contacted you personally via e-mail and even called you. I've asked you questions before but my question now is, was what happened to me part of some Divine plan? Also how do we deal with such a traumatic attack? God bless!     

 

 

Answer to Question 46

 

 At the time when you contemplated becoming a monk you didn’t tell me of your traumatic experience and that because of this you wanted to abandon the terrible world we live in. If I had known at the time I would have tried to persuade you to rethink because you would have been entering a monastery for the wrong reasons.

 

 Now I can also understand your previous questions on human suffering and why God would allow someone to suffer.  You ask if what happened to you was part of some Divine plan. God didn’t send the attack on your loved one; God does not take pleasure in destroying the living things he has created. It was a result of evil influencing certain individuals to do harm to others. I have mentioned before that God does not intervene because he respects man’s freewill even the choices of the evil person to do harm. It does not mean that God likes it or approves of it, but the evil person it also his child and is given the same opportunity to repent of his evil until his earthly life comes to an end. This can be difficult to understand because with our logic and human judgment it may seem that God allows the evil person to operate without repercussions, but that is only in this temporary world. God sees the eternal truth were the perpetrator will not escape his punishment in eternity. 

 

Nevertheless, we say that nothing in our lives happens without a reason. I suppose what we mean by this is that we can turn the evil done against us into a reason to bring us closer to God. That is why the fathers of the Church tell us to look upon our infirmities and life’s difficulties as a blessing from God for they are often a source for us to grow stronger in faith. Only you will understand if the evil done against you and the loss of your loved one has brought you closer to God and helped you grow spiritually.

 

You ask how to deal with such a traumatic attack? Only God’s love can bring true healing and prayer is the means by which we seek his love. When we ask for God’s mercy we are in fact asking him to heal our existence in such a way as to allow him to find rest within our own hearts and bring about a union with his love. When this happens then our difficulties in life begin to fade and we begin to see things in a different light. This will not happen overnight; it is easy to love those who do good to us, but the hardest thing to love those that cause harm to us and hate and persecute us. But if we persevere in prayer and allow God to heal our pains, then one day we will like Christ say: forgive them Lord for they know not what they do.