Tenderness

You wrote:

This is nearly impossible for me to do, so hampered am I in the expression of tenderness towards others

Without getting into a psychoanalysis session of Le Bagwell is this really so? I mean I assume you are tender to your good lady wife? Why not to others also, is this a matter of trust perhaps?

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Yes when faced with talking to a person who has had a loss I think most folks would try to be empathetic as that is what they would hope for were the situation reversed (... treat others ... etc). Mind you, there is a class of professional analyst that really gets my goat in this area, one was recently exemplified in a scene I saw on a plane on my last trip to New York. The movie was called "Flightplan" I think, and the way the movie depicted a professional analysts treatment of the Jodie Foster chartacter, with such subtle condescension, was really well done.

Note: I am suspicious of "experts" in general, so often they (me?) are "ex" as in "has-been" and "spurts" as in small squirts of water :-)

"There there, it will be alright, how could the world possibly be this way, you are confused .. etc"

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After the empathy and you look to see what is going on when really bad things happen to ordinary people then there are a couple of things that spring to mind:

Isaiah 48:10

Behold, I have refined thee, but not with silver; I have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction.

By this we can expect to be tested and "refined". For God to test us in some way and to encourage us to be fit to be chosen, for salvation one assumes.

The other possibility perhaps is that God is cutting off some branch in the family tree that will lead to another Adolf Hitler or something, six generations down the line. When you can see all of time in one go then who knows what you could end up doing?

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To me the unsatisfactory thing is that God could have disallowed all this bad stuff. The reason that He did not and does not is a total mystery.

Being omnipotent, He could have designed a Human that was incapable of sinning. The argument you gave against this on Sunday May 8th 2005 was:

I believe God could have created us incapable of sinning. We would be an earth full of automatons, moving about doing simply as we were programmed, offering to God our praise based on our firmware, receiving from God the bounty of his love without real appreciation for what it is or its value.

On reflection you've made quite a leap between sentence one and sentence two. This assumes that God is incapable of making a sinless perfect human that was not an automaton, a sinless perfect human that was not doing simply as it were programmed, a sinless perfect human that gave praise to God from his or her own free will, a sinless perfect human that ... you get the idea. Let me ask you, do you really believe that God is limited in this fashion?

Likewise, do you really believe that God was unaware of exactly what his creation was going to do before He created it? He must have, all part and parcel of omnipotence. What happens is, after all, all in the plan.

I'm not happy limiting God in any way. God created us sinners for a reason, and that reason will always be a mystery to me, in this life anyway.

It's almost as if what we think of as bad is not actually bad -- I can't quite verbalize/visualize it yet.

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I'm not trying to be difficult. I am trying to make sense of the world when bad things happen. A previous (Christian) manager (2nd line) of mine said "Imagine the Universe as a perfect vase, and then a crack appears. Sin is this crack that got in and God cries real tears over it". I'm sorry but that does not wash with me - the crack was in God's plan, he's not some limited being whose vase got cracked.