First response: That is a fair question. Somehow we got this idea that it is a sign of unbelief or is a challenge, a rebellion against God, if we ask the question, "Why do the innocent suffer?" When I first started my Christian pilgrimage and I would ask that kind of question, people said, "If you had faith, you wouldn't ask that kind of question."

Well, the Bible asks that question often. In the 22nd Psalm, the Psalmist says, "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? I call to you day and night, and you do not answer. You saved my ancestors. You don't save me. My friends all mock me. They say, 'You believe in God. Why hasn't he delivered you?'"

Our Lord Jesus Christ quoted that Psalm from the cross. The whole book of Job is about why God, if He is great and good, allows a good man like Job to suffer. Jeremiah and the prophets cry out without answer. It is a fair question.

My good friend, John Claypool, lost his daughter, Laura, at age 11 to leukemia. My mentor, Carlyle Marney, who was also a good friend of John, wrote him a short note and he said, "John, I do not understand why leukemia kills children, but I do know that God has a lot to account for some day."

Later I asked Marney, "Was that one of your famous statements of reverent agnosticism?"

He said, "Oh, no. It is a statement of reverent faith. If I am a person, if God is a person, then questions are in order. I believe that God is the kind of God He said who will allow us to question Him, challenge Him, be angry at Him."

That was a great relief to me because I have to tell you—and I will tell you in a moment—about my own personal experience. There are times in my life when I have been so angry at God that I have asked Him to kill me and cursed Him when He wouldn't. It is a fair question.

If God is great and God is good, why do the innocent suffer. Second response: I do not know.

I think Frederick Buechner is right. If you take three facts, God is good, God is great, and the innocent suffer, you can only reconcile two of those. You can never, ever reconcile all three. The Bible never gives an answer. After Job complains and complains, God says to Him, "Where were you when I created the world? You don't ask me those questions." He says to Jeremiah, "I am the potter, you are the clay. The clay does not ask the potter that kind of question."

The Bible doesn't answer the question and neither can I. I don't know why bad things happen to good people, to use Dr. Kushner's famous phrase. This is more than a speculation for me; it is more than an intellectual subject.

Our first child was a rubella baby. Her mother had measles in the early weeks of pregnancy. She was born profoundly deaf and emotionally limited. She has the emotional level of a very small child. She is now 33. She has had a tragic life of drugs and rehab centers and has been a pain and a source of grief and struggle for my wife and me all of our adult lives. It will be a pain that will be there the day that I die.

I'll never forget when she was seven years and we were told that we would have to send her to a school in Massachusetts, two thousand miles from where I pastored a small church in the early days of my ministry. On the night before we were to go, at age seven she came into my study. I was writing my doctoral dissertation, believe it or not, on why the innocent suffer.

In her halting way of talking to me, she said, "Daddy, do I have to go?"

I said, "You know you must."

She said, "Because I am deaf."

I said, "Yes."

She said, "Would you pray for God to let me hear like you and Mommy hear?"

What else could I do. I said, "I ask God that every day of your life."

She said, "Would you ask Him now?"

I got down on my knees and I prayed as I could. When I opened my eyes, I looked into her expectant, wondrous eyes.

She said, "Daddy, what did God say?"

I had to admit that God hadn't said one solitary thing. There was nothing but silence. God is great, God is good. Why do the innocent suffer? I do not know.

But less we end there in that cul-de-sac of agnosticism, let me tell you what I do know. I do know that sandwiched up against the impenetrable blackness of evil there is the indomitable brightness of good. There is extraordinary goodness in the world, and extraordinary goodness is a greater problem for an atheist than extraordinary evil is for a believer. In my own experience I have seen such magnificent expressions of goodness.

Let me tell you the rest of the story of our daughter, Cindy. Her tuition at that school was exactly the equivalent of my salary. I went to my church and asked if they could maybe help me send her to school. They were giving thousands of dollars to all kinds of mission causes. I thought maybe she would qualify as a mission. They gave me no raise at all.

I got a call one day from a banker I did not know. He was noted for being a hard-boiled, sharp-pencilled business man. He said, "Would you come to my office?"

I walked in. He was a no-nonsense guy. He said, "I hear you have a problem. I am going to help you solve it. Can you keep a secret?"

I said, "Not from my wife."

He said, "Can she keep a secret?"

I said, "Yes, better than I."

He said, "I am going to put you in the cattle-feeding business. I am going to back you one hundred percent. I am going to personally sign your notes."

I said, "What if they lose?"

He said, "I have so much money that we will never run out until we hit the jackpot."

I am here to tell you that for the next three years while our daughter was away in school I signed all of my paychecks back to the church. Extraordinary goodness.

The day that we were to leave, I broke down and sobbed. I'll never forget her tiny hand on my shoulder saying, "Daddy, God will take care of me."

I don't know why the innocent suffer, but I do know that sandwiched up against the blackness of evil is the brightness of good. I do know that God will not let us live in a world where He has haphazard things, cause and effect, happen. God can no more change the way that He has set the world up to run than He can make a four-sided triangle.

Ultimately I do know that God will not leave evil unanswered. I think there is a day coming when all of the crooked things will be made straight and all of the dark things will be made bright and all of the innocent will be vindicated. I think that is what the cross of Christ is all about.

I have never understood all of those theories about how Christ atoned for our sin, but I do know that somehow in the cross event, God took upon Himself the blame for having created a world where things can go wrong. The resurrection is God's declaration that eventually things will go right.

I myself have had enough evidence from the goodness of people, and from my own experience with the goodness of God, to keep going. We have a choice. Evil, suffering, tragedy can paralyze you or you can take the evil and the suffering and you can metabolize it. You can ingest it, digest it, transform it into a higher good. It is up to you and it is up to me to make that choice. All that I am saying to you is that I have found enough goodness in the world to choose to keep lighting candles instead of cursing the darkness.

If God is great and God is good, why do the innocent suffer? That is a fair question. I don't know, but I do know there is a goodness in this world that cannot be explained outside of a God who loves you and me. Ultimately I rest my case on the fact that through this long, dark night of suffering—and my suffering has not been nearly what some of yours has been—it is okay to hold up my head and go forward. God grant you the grace to experience that goodness yourself

David Hardin: In one of the articles about your church—I think it was in Newsweek—you were asked why it grew so fast. You found four things that drive people away from church. I think they were boring sermons, unfriendly people, talking too much about money and finally, not very good child care or child teaching. How did you overcome those? How do you keep your sermons from being boring?

Gerald Mann: First, I limit them to eighteen minutes. I get many more compliments on short sermons than long ones. It takes more study, but we live in the time of the sound bite and psychologically we are sound bite people. The sermons need to be short; they need to be about subjects where people live. People want three things. They want help; they want hope; they want home. Those are the three criteria I use when I finish preparing a sermon.

Hardin: They want home. You mean they want to go home?

Mann: They want a sense of belonging. They want a place where they can show all their warts and pimples and be who they are and be accepted. They want a sense of homecoming. We use the word "welcome" a lot.

Hardin: You can control that, but how do you control the idea of unfriendly people?

Mann: I think that when you take a church like ours, that started with one person and a small group and today is a growing, mega-church, the church generally takes on the warmth of the pulpit. If the pastor is a welcoming and inclusive kind of person and the leadership is inclusive, then the people will be that way. You don't have to manipulate. You have to normally be that way. If the pastor is cold or if the church has a tradition of coldness, then the people will generally be that way.

We go after the four B's: the bruised, the battered, the broken, the bored. That is our target. When you get people who have been bruised, battered and broken, hurting people have great tolerance and a welcoming attitude about them. There is something about suffering that levels down the differences between people. We will have people in sandals and bluejeans and people in Brooks Brothers suits, the whole range of folks.

Hardin: Do you agree that too many churches talk too much about money?

Mann: I don't know that they talk too much about money. It is just that the baby boomer who we go after, the believers who don't go to church, are skeptical about any talk about money. They get beat up in the world so much. We are the children of materialism. The god, Mammon, is the big, bad one out there. When they come to church, they don't want to be hit on about money. You have got to talk to them about generosity; you have got to get to them about specific needs. We can't raise money for things like budgets and causes.

We had Olga Korbut, the Russian gymnast, in our church and raised several thousand dollars one day when she talked about the millions of children in Russia who were hurt and affected by the meltdown—the children of Chernobyl. If you have a specific thing, they will respond to it. To talk about some broad thing, they don't do that at all. I don't know if I answered your question.

Hardin: I want to go back to your talk for just a minute because you mentioned how this fellow challenged God. Does God like us to challenge Him?

Mann: I think so.

Hardin: I've always been a little scared of that.

Mann: I'm not trying to sell my book, but you are giving it away. There is a chapter called, "There's clout in doubt." The greatest day in my life, Dave, was when I got to the place where I was no longer afraid that some human mind would destroy the reality of God for me. It was out of the depths of suffering and cursing God, I was so angry with Him, that a kind of peace came to me. I think airing it out with God has some of the same effect that it does in any personal relationship. I think it brings people closer together.

Hardin: In other words, He wants intimacy with us. That only comes out of being real and letting Him know where we stand and what we think. You are saying He welcomes that.

Mann: That is what drew the people to Jesus. Jesus was not a churchy person.

Hardin: I can't turn God off on me by being angry?

Mann: God can handle your anger. He can handle that.

Hardin: Let's go back to getting young people involved in the church. I have young adult children in their thirties and late twenties and they have a lot of friends. That crowd is very disillusioned about the future. They are living in the present and they are not very optimistic. Do you experience that?

Mann: I think there is a sort of melancholy over the land. The seventy-fifth anniversary issue of "Forbes Magazine" was about this angst. We have it better than any nation in the history of the world. I think we are disillusioned because we have lived for many years with an illusion. Disillusionment, as I often say, is always the child of illusionment. We had this illusion that we could have the Great Society and the Great Frontier and that we could use the government programs to solve everything.

All of our saviors have let us down. Education and money hasn't really brought us the sort of inward peace that we want, so I think there is a massive disillusionment in the country because we based it on an illusion. We are the first generation in history that has expected life to be happy. We are the first generation that expects to have the ultimate marriage, the ultimate job, the ultimate religion, no problems, and we are setting ourselves up for great angst when we do that.

Hardin: Expectations are almost always kind of a disaster, aren't they? I have always felt that gratitude is such a marvelous emotion, gratitude for being alive, for the gift of seeing beautiful trees and all that. I love it when my kids are grateful, not because I need it, but because it is such a healthy emotion compared to entitlement, which is what you are talking about.

Mann: Yes, and we all have the language of entitlement—it's my right, I am entitled to it. If there is anything that the Old Testament and the New Testament agree on throughout, it is that everything is a gift and we are only the users of it. We keep confusing stewardship with ownership. We don't own even our own lives. Now I am sounding like a preacher, but that is profoundly true. I had to understand that my daughter was not my daughter but that she was God's daughter and that she had been given to me to do what I could with for a while.

Hardin: Ultimately she would be in just as good a place as you are or will ever be and that can be trusted.

Mann: That is what grace is. Underneath everything, it's okay. We have had I'm okay, you're okay and they're okay, but the Good News of Jesus Christ is that it's okay. Underneath everything there is a bottom that holds us in love and grace. I've only found that through the depths of suffering.