"Even if that means feeling things."

We have been discussing the problem of evil. That is to say, we have been reducing it to intellect and mind and forgotten feeling and soul.

"The question [of evil] arises from our experience of dissonance ("This can't be right! This isn't the way it's supposed to be!"). Our answers too often squelch that dissonance and thus make the question moot."(1)

I have written in the margins a large heart, an exclamation point, and a prayer: Lord, help me sit in the mystery of crying "this isn't how it's supposed to be." Make me feel it.

"Through, not around," a professor(2) addressed a room full of perfectionistic, intelligent, and often searching college students at a banquet, "even if that means feeling things." I must feel things. I know this, yet sometimes it is so very difficult to pick up a pen and acknowledge what I feel even to a page in a journal no one will ever see, to a God who sees and knows and loves me.

"We also devalue or deny our intuitions of what ought to be—what is good and beautiful, what gratitude is for. When we try to extinguish the dark mystery of evil with the light of explanation, we simultaneously dim the radiance of beauty that befalls us as unbidden. We forfeit the impulse to say 'thank you'; we rule out the joy that attends those moments when we think, 'This is how it's meant to be.' We explain evil only to explain away love."(1)

I forget. I forget to feel, to look, to love. How often to I explain away war, injustice, illness, doubt? Only to explain away love.

It seems unreasonable, sometimes, to believe. How can my God be wholly good and perfectly omnipotent when I live in such a broken, evil world? Is it unreasonable, I ask myself?

The only semblance of an answer, I think, is that Logos Himself—Reason, the Word—became a human living in this broken world like me to die the most horrible death on a cross, for me.

Perhaps it is just the same answer of Orual in C.S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces: "I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?"

(1) James K.A. Smith, On the Road with Saint Augustine
(2) Jer Nelson, Anderson University Spring Honors Banquet 2026