God has built an incredible world, and the people in it with the capacity to love and hate, create beauty and ugliness, bring joy and sadness, experience exhilaration and horror. His Word teaches us how to do and experience the former but does not prevent us from doing the latter of each pair and more. That is a gift, because had he created us without free will or intervened frequently we would be lesser because of it. To suppose He is filled with cruelty instead of love is to misunderstand the great gift of free will. Why are we the only creature that truly has and exercises free will (don't confuse it with instinct)?

I pose many questions, and all can be answered from a perspective of God's involvement or not. For those who believe in a loving God, life contains all the same perils and difficulties as it does for others. But we experience these things differently, with a perspective on why they happen and where they are leading us that is quite different than those who don't. cont.