The inevitable question hangs tough today, demanding an answer. Millions want to know, “If God is (real), how could He allow such evil? Yesterday, twenty innocent (in the eye of God) little people entered Heaven, never to feel pain again and we, like Job, are left to work this over, trying to wrap our heads around this evil. In the first book of the Bible, we find Gen. 1:26 and we see that God made man in His Image. God is a Spirit being and in no manor human at the point of Creation and that is important to remember here. And in the Bible, we learn that God created all that has been created for “His” pleasure... God has free will and because we are created in the image of God, we have free will. In the first chapters of Genesis we see that free will has good and evil options to work with ad sometimes from. We find early on that God, the Creator, walked with Adam in the cool of the evening. Adam and God both longed for fellowship and both chose to enjoy the other. And in the second chapter, we see God finds that Adam is without a help mate and God removes one of Adam's ribs and creates the most beautiful, perfect vision of a woman and rings her to Adam to wed. God's free will is always perfect and His actions are always time just right. Adam was alone just long enough to know that he was incomplete, just long enough to develop the need for his mate. If God had created Eve at the same time He did Adam it is quite possible that Adam might never have realized his deep need need of the fellowship she brought to his life. If Adam had never had the opportunity to realize his need for companionship, he and we might never have had the opportunity to realize that his need was a picture of the free will love God feels for us. (The first three chapters of Genesis cannot be exhaustively taught from the pulpit in a year, maybe two.) The other side of free will is evil! But, you see, without the ability to exercise free will, there can be no love and love is the good every one of us needs. Love is not the product Hollywood pushes onto our children when we fail to live the truth in front of them. What Hollywood is selling is a soft side of evil. No! I did not just call the coupling of a man and his wife evil. However, what is ignored in the church today, the back seat activities of teens and the married but not to each other activities, promoted by Hollywood and Broadway is evil... soft, wanted but evil! And I assure you that you need to study the Book of Job until you can see the love of God that I see there. As bad as it appears, God knew Job's breaking point and He never allowed Satan to push Job that hard. When Job's trial was over and he had learned how strong his faith was, he ws completely restored and he was blessed wit hthe knowledge he would never have gained. The moms and dads are mentally collapsed today and the journey back is very, very hard to travel. When my very best friend took an eighty-one mm in the chest, I was the first to find him and I remember nothing of the following three months other than what I was told I did. The parents of these missing babies do not have an ever present enemy and they are not supplied with a never ending supply of munitions, praise God. They need our tears and our prayers and no, they will not be healed in ninety days and they will not be healed in twenty years. These fellow parents, grandparents, classmates, brothers and sisters are hurt and incomplete until the day they, I pray, go home to Heaven. Please, cease not to pray.