You have been promised a lucrative position in a multi-national firm after a successful  interview! Of the short-listed seventy-five, three are picked for the final appearance before the Executive Selection Committee - and you are among them. The final moment arrives but, to your surprise, there is one more meeting in a week’s time to finally decide who will be taken. The tie comes and they call each of you three in.

But here is your moment! You walk in and the interview panel says, yes, you are properly, highly qualified, the perfect one for the position - but you are over-age by two years!

Say, we can reverse the calendar. No, it is impossible, to say nothing of your being a Christian and that to lie would be to spurn God’s law. Besides, it would be too late to do that even if lying were permissible.

In part, that is how I felt on 4th of February this year when I realized, after intensive medical tests, that it was finally impossible to restore my sight. A year earlier, an examining ophthalmologist indicated I could, through surgery, regain a reasonable of percentage to enable me operate with relative independence.

I do not blame him for this. I guess he needed more time to do further tests to arrive at a conclusive picture like the doctors at St. Luke’s Eye Clinic did on the 4th of February . I am not sorry anymore that the prediction a year earlier could not be realised. On the contrary, I joy in the fact that I now know nothing can be done surgically and I need not waste time looking for a medical solution.

The doctor at St. Luke’s Eye Clinic stammered, hesitated, at the news he was about to break: that they could do nothing for me; that even if I regained any vision, it would be ‘in the single digits’, nothing to facilitate the kind of independence such surgery would attempt to achieve. I would still need someone to lead me around. Upto the age of eight, something would have been possible, even a 20 - 20 chance. My brain, they said, had unlearned most of the images associated with my previous vision, etc.

I lost my sight at the age of three, probably when I was just as big as our daughter Shekinah who will soon turn four. There wasn’t sufficient medical attention possible where I grew up and the gradual loss of sight, from a measles attack, soon degenerated into a permanent state of blindness, leaving me with only a little perception of light. Braille, typewriting and other skills learnt at the School for The Blind remain handy to this day. Typing was particularly helpful at the university and is what has made my using the computer possible.

I have asked many questions in my life, the least of which is not why a good God would allow handicaps. In the words of the Jewish Rabbi, Harold Kushner, I asked , “why do bad things happen to good people?” I was not assuming that I was a good person deserving the good. All I wanted to know was, was there any purpose in living with a visual handicap in a world where vision was an indispensable necessity? In 1988, when God seemed silent, seemingly unable to respond to my challenge, I almost took my life.

In the midst of despair as I lay in my hospital bed in a different eye clinic in Germany, I challenged God to explain this situation that so left me with a great admiration of the existential philosophers like Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus. The “meaningless” chapters of Ecclesiastes seemed to represent my condition very well when read with existential overtones. I think if I had read Kushner’s position that grants the “inability” of God to control the world He has made, it would have been extremely pallatable. God, indeed, responded to the challenge. Before I conclude this testimony with what God’s response was, let me share three observations that make me hold onto His response to my challenge:

First, considering the ‘madness’ of man and his confessed limitations, I think God alone could explain the problem of evil. Our limitation, manifest even in the little mistakes in the best of our technology, tells me that there is a divine, supernatural intelligence that explains our own intelligence. Intelligence could never come from non-intelligence. From the sinking of the Titanic to the explosion of the Challenger rocket, the massacres in Rwanda, Somalia and Yugoslavia as man’s best social institutions like the U.N. watch in amazed helplesness, there might be just one more reminder that our best efforts are still subject to limitation. God alone can explain what is happening.

Second, the fact that limited beings don’t see any purpose in what God allows does not mean there is no purpose altogether. Upon failing to find clear evidence of life on Mars, the astronauts will not throw their hands in the air and say science has proved there is no life on Mars. Investigation must go on. After missing the way when going to a new place for the first time, we do not quickly retreat and complain that there is no way. We keep looking. If we cannot immediately find a clear explanation to the mystery of evil, it will not be wise to conclude that there is no explanation. It is even a worse mistake to postulate alternative theories that might, in fact, treat evil as an illusion.

Similarly, the atheist does not solve the problem of evil by postulating the nonexistence of God. The nonexistence of God actually accentuates this problem. At least with the existence of God, you still have someone to question. Our problem is impatience. We do not want to live by a divine law as we wait for God to finally wipe out the entire problem as He has promised.

Anyone who blames God for all the evil and accuses Him for creating a world with the possibility of evil forgets that moral evil is man’s problem and natural evil, in most cases, quite useful for life on earth. It is human beings, not God, who manufacture guns, nuclear bombs, bows and arrows. It is they who will equally transform the use of a knife from kitchen utility to a weapon for murder and other forms of violence. People then wish that God would stop all the crime in the world. However, when God asks them to love one another and do good to those who mistreat them, they argue that religion is for the weak and it is stupid not to hit back. It is better to pile bombs and other forms of ammunition with the hope that they will one day be used, than to waste time loving.

It is like telling God, “Love is not the solution; please try something else!” or, “Your laws are too simplistic! Remember we are intelligent beings who operate with sophistication and more practical ideas.” God is reduced to a dumb creator who does not know what is good for what His creation.

But supposing God stopped all evil! This would not leave you and I as free choosing beings. Suppose each time you wished to say something bad, He made you temporarily mute. Or if a bad thought was coming, He caused you a temporary mental black-out or some migraine headache. Would this too not be evil in our sight? The only other alternative in God’s hand would be for Him to make us something other than the human race - perhaps, the lower animals! Or take away physical pain by making us grass, or rocks, or hills or one of the stars. But these we are not. We are intelligent human beings. If we were created simply like moral machines which God only needed to push a button for us to obey His will, this might solve the problem of evil but having tasted the sweetness of being human, we would rather live up to moral responsibility than compete with mountains for mountainness.

With regard to natural evil, I ask: We blame God for creating bacteria and viruses, etc. Can we imagine what the world would be like if bodies did not decompose? How would certain arid parts of the world be irrigated without flooding? How could we maintain the balance of rocks and other sediments in the earth’s crust without earthquakes? Can you imagine oxidation without lighting and thunderstorms? I may not be a specialist in these areas, but I am persuaded that it is misleading to charge God with purposelessness in His world just because we see no purpose, ourselves being limited.

Lastly, there have been manifest positive reasons for certain evils even in our present world. A little tooth-ache warns us that we are going to lose a tooth unless we see a dentist. Many symptoms of diseases lead us to seek medical advice or help. I think it would even be worse if, immediately a disease struck, the next second we were dead. C. S Lewis once said, “God whispers in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience but shouts in our pain.” He added that “pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a morally deaf.