God's Plan

Tell me if this scenario is familiar: Someone has suffered a really hard loss, say the loss of a child or a spouse, and in attempting to comfort them, some well-meaning friend says "Well, it's all part of God's plan." I wonder if these people have ever thought about what they're saying. Basically, they're telling this poor, grieving soul that the one thing they thought they could turn to, God, to get through this is responsible for it in the first place. I can't think of a more callous thing to say. It takes away what little hope they might have had and replaces with..., what? The knowledge that our Creator is a hard, capricious overseer who singles people out for suffering and hardship in the furtherance of some unknown plan for the universe? I hope that's not the case. I prefer to believe in a God who's a loving father, one that would never cause his children pain. One whose plan is to show us his love and have a relationship with us. Whose will is that we love each other. Wholly and unconditionally. The fact is, human suffering has been around as long as people have been on the Earth. Unfortunately, it's probably going to around for a while yet. Some of our hardships come about because of our own actions and we can accept that as a consequence of free will. But, when we (or someone we love) suffers through no fault of our own, that's a different story. How many times has someone asked "Why does God let bad things happen to good people"? Probably about as long as people have been suffering. And, almost as long, people much smarter than me have been trying to answer it. Without much success, I might add. I doubt there will ever be a satisfactory answer to that question. Because we're human, and the only way we have of expressing ideas, thoughts or feelings is through words. And, at times like these, words fail. Language is a wretched medium for communicating things of God. They can't broken down and quantified like a math equation. Poetry probably comes closest and even that ultimately fails. I kind of hope it's us and our brokenness that causes this. Because, then I can hope that it won't always be this way. As for what you should say to someone who's suffering? I don't know that there's anything to say besides "I'm here and I'm going through this with you". This is definitely a time when actions speak louder than words.