Rod relates a heartrending story of a family wiped out, or nearly so, on what should have been the happiest of days. “I do believe in God, but stories like this are the best reason I can think of to disbelieve,” he says.
There’s an all too easy answer to the question of why bad things happen to innocent people — the evils of his world, great as they seem in the light of our mortal lives, are nothing compared to whatever reward (or punishment) awaits in the next. The immortality of the soul and the scale of eternity can erase any transient suffering in this life, or so the logic goes. But this is cold comfort, and the reason it’s cold comfort raises a more difficult question. The things that matter to us are all limited and mortal; our knowledge and experience of them occurs only within the parameters of mortal, earthly existence. An immortal, unearthly existence, whatever else can be said for it, is not one that much resembles the world or people we love in our fragile, time-bound lives. The joys of reunion with lost loved ones in the afterlife are some solace to grieving families in the here and now, but the more the mind considers a different plane of existence in an entirely different context from the one we know, where even the self has lost the horizon of experience, the less appealing it becomes.
Tony 
tbraton 
Is existence byond this veil of tears foreign in the sense that the good as we know it will no longer be available to us? If the good, in this somewhat disordered and atomized world, offers reasons to hope, believe, and love, then how much greater is an existense in a new heaven and new earth where separation, isolation, and the pains of selfishness have been overcome?
Several years ago I lost my sight to a rare genetic disorder. This does not, however, undermine my conviction that longings for a redeemed earth with the fallen lifted up is more desirable then a brief glimpse about my surroundings in the short gasp of air that will characterize my time on this rotating rock.
A Creator who longs for redemption, reconciliation, and spoke a good earth into existence would not send us into an eternity so foreign and undesirable as to undermine any insight or beauty we might have experienced while participating in this finite existence. This is, in brief sketch, the hope that I persist in holding.
I hope the child finds a loving family. There are some terrible foster parents in the system.