What do you say to that?

A dear friend of mine is a psychologist who works with abused children. She wrote me this morning and asked what I would say to a boy who was abused/molested by his father about if there is a God, why did He let this happen to me. Below is my response to her. She liked it, so I thought you might, too.

P.S. Please pray for her patient as he struggles through his pain.

This is just off the top of my head, so if I think of
more later, I will let you know.

What is he really asking here is the key. There seem
to be two questions, the spoken and the unspoken. The
unspoken is the more interesting of the two. It is ” I
have two fathers, an earthly one and a Heavenly One.
If the earthly one is crap, how can I trust the other?
And I so desperately want to trust the other.”

The only way to answer that question is to answer the
spoken one. Why would a loving God allow bad things
to happen? The short answer is “because He gave us the
gift of Free-Will”. Somehow I suspect that the short
answer will not work for him. I think there are two
answers:

God created all of us with, and gave us the gift of,
intelligence and the freedom of choice. Sometimes,
unfortunately, people misuse these gifts and use their
brains, their will, and their freedom to hurt others.
Does it suck sometimes, yes. So how does God work
then ? What would you have Him do? Would you have
Him strike your father dead on the spot for hurting
you? Is that the answer? You see, He is not just
your Father, but your dad’s too. What He wants for
your dad is to see what he has done wrong and change.
Will it happen? We don’t know. If your dad wants to
change, then God can give him the strength of will and
brain and heart which is necessary to make that
change. God gives your father the whole of his life
to ask for help, because God loves him. Great for
your dad, but sucks for anyone who comes near him.

Here comes the second part. There is a purpose to
pain. It is one of the most important lessons we can
learn in this life. Pain is not without purpose or
reason. We are meant to learn something from it and
then carry that lesson forward. Did God cause your
father to hurt you? No, but he chose you to be his
son. So, what is the lesson? That’s the hard part,
learning the lesson. Have you ever heard of metal
which has been tested in fire? When people make
things, like swords, out of metal, they heat the metal
to glowing hot and then work it then cool it and then
heat it up again. The fire and the heat actually
change the chemical and physical properties of the
metal, making it stronger than it originally was.
There is no other way to strengthen it other than to
put it into the fire. If it is not heated, then the
first blow will cause it to break. What good is a
sword that breaks the first time it is used? You are
like that sword, and you have been tested in the fire
to make you stronger and better than you were
originally. Was it horrible and painful? Yes. Will
it make you stronger and better in the end? Only if
you let it.