Some theological questions I shouldn’t even attempt to answer.

One day my four-year-old daughter was pushing a piece of food around on her plate. “Dad?” Anna asked thoughtfully. “If Jesus lives in my heart, does he have to eat the same stuff I do?”

I went for the bluff. “Yes. And he loves broccoli.”

For all I know, Jesus hates broccoli. But I had an agenda (i.e., get kid to eat gross-looking green bonsai tree). So I made up an answer.

Religious folk tend to do that a lot–pontificating on issues they’d be much better keeping quiet about. Like the question, “Why?” Theologically speaking, “why?” is probably the most-asked and worst-answered question there is: Why does God allow suffering? Why did God let me get sick? Why doesn’t God let me win the lottery?

Inquiring minds have wanted to know since Job felt he got a raw deal. And, like Job’s friends, there’s always someone willing to act as God’s spokesman and provide an answer. That someone, unfortunately, also has an agenda. It may be to comfort. Or chastise. Or impress. Or control. Whatever the motive, the answer will likely have a personal bias. (God’s answer to Job, as I read it, was, “None of your business.”)

There are two schools of thought on this subject of “why.” One is that everything happens for a reason; it’s all part of some grand design that ultimately will prove to be for our good. Many people take great comfort from this. But it can also cause plenty of frustration as we wonder why God didn’t choose a less painful way to deliver our blessing.

Another viewpoint is that God has allowed for an element of chance in the universe. In the popular film Forrest Gump, Forrest’s friend Bubba lies mortally wounded on a Vietnamese battlefield. “Why did this have to happen?” he implores. Gump replies with typical simplistic profundity, “You got shot.”

And maybe that’s all there was to it. Maybe that bullet didn’t “have Bubba’s name on it.” Maybe it was just one of life’s accidents–a case of being in the wrong place at the right time. The danger here is adopting a fatalistic view of life. We can begin to think God isn’t concerned with the details, and that faith and prayer do nothing to change our circumstances.

Whichever view we take–random chance or grand design–the bottom-line answer to ninety percent of life’s “why’s” (if we’re to be honest) is, “I don’t know.”

I once heard a seasoned old pastor say, “It’s alright to ask ‘why?’ But we mustn’t let the ‘why’ get too big.” Wise words. Because when we allow “why” to become really large in our lives, we may find it can paralyze us. And the really important question, ultimately, is not “why?” The really important question, the one we can answer, the one that will shape our lives, is this:

“What am I going to do?”