Half Full

I admit, I've been struggling. It's been hard for me to pin down exactly why, but one thing that keeps cropping up is, of all things, the existence of evil. I know I know, Timothy Keller has a great section on it in The Reason For God, but thats not really what I'm talking about. I'm not wrestling with "Evil exists, how can God be good!" or "Evil exists, there is no God!". Nope. I'm struggling with "Evil exists......why?". I was prompted into thinking about it again tonight because the mom of a good friend of mine directed me to read her posting on facebook wherein she thanked God for His goodness for sustaining both her son and her mother when they were recently in seperate, but equally severe, car accidents. I too thank God, Jonathan is a dear friend and her mother is an amazing woman. I wondered though. What about the situations where people aren't saved, where the amazing friend and son, or the caring and loving mother, or whoever, is hit by a car and is killed. What about the people that don't barely escape, that don't just make it out, that don't survive because that steel pipe went that extra 6 inches and impaled them or that fallen electrical wire didnt dangle just out of reach of the frame of their wrecked car but, rather, fell on their car and electricuted them. You get the point. In all honesty, sometimes I think our theology surrounding evil is incredibly convenient. We say that God was so gracious to save one of our loved ones from an accident that someone else, whom is usually less known or unknown, didn't survive, and their deaths don't seem to weigh on us or bother us. Was God gracious to the person who burned alive in the wreckage?

I want to be very clear that this is not a charge against God, and I am not shaking my fist at God nor am I being cynical about any of these situations. I just don't understand. Is it really love when a father does nothing as his son is being beaten to death? God did do that to Jesus, but wasn't that in order that we might be saved? What was the purpose behind not intervening for the Jews during the Holocaust, or for the children dying of starvation and AIDS in Africa?

I guess my problem isn't with the conception that God is love. What is becoming painfully obvious, however, is that I don't have any idea what that word means.