Joan of Arcadia and suffering

I was watching an old “Joan of Arcadia” episode, and there was one scene with one guy I really identified with. The main character’s mother was trying to deal with her son having become a paraplegic, and enough time had passed that she had gone from emotional shock to trying to work through all the emotional and spiritual aspects of this change in their lives. A priest in a parking lot had one of those red Salvation Army buckets and was collecting for the poor. She dropped some change in and walked away, then stopped, came back, and began to demand all kinds of answers. Since he had the collar on, he obviously had a handle on the whole God-thing. So she assaulted him with all these questions that the greatest theologians haven’t been able to adequately answer. “If God is a father, why doesn’t He make everything better like fathers are supposed to do? Explain to me the whole suffering thing.” And so on. And that poor young man under the onslaught of all these impossible questions completely lost his brain. He was supposed to have all the answers because he was a priest, and he’d probably even written neat theological essays in seminary on the very subject, but in the suddenness of what had to seem like an attack, his head probably emptied of all those excellent words, and he could only stare dumbly at her and stammer weakly that he’d pray for her.
I completely identified with the poor man, as a seminary student myself who will likely be asked to answer these questions. I would lose all my clever answers, too. It’s one thing, like C.S. Lewis, to know many things intellectually and another to go through it yourself and have your assumptions tested.
I would hope that, given the opportunity to get over my temporary brainlessness, I would be able to convey something of meaning across. Even if it was only the difficult-to-accept truth that at times God is incomprehensible. He does not conform Himself to our specifications. I would like to be able to reassure the person that despite how unsatisfactory that sounds, He truly is good and loving and desires to bring peace even when He doesn’t change the situation. It’s interesting how often our demands for answers are demands for God to be what we want Him to be. We say, a loving God should fix all the world’s problems. But since He is God and He is loving and He hasn’t fixed all the world’s problems, then probably a loving God shouldn’t fix all the world’s problems. A good father shouldn’t give his child everything she wants, despite her unhappiness at not getting it. If our loving God doesn’t do what we want, does it mean we finite, small-minded, created beings are right and the infinite, omniscient, all-powerful Creator is wrong? I don’t think so.
Now the trick is to actually remember and understand this stuff when I’m slapped across the head with something catastrophic. Like C.S. Lewis.

“It’s a perfect system, Joan.” The “God” character says that all the time on “Joan of Arcadia.” I like it a lot. It points out the rather obvious but always confusing, seeming contradiction in life. God’s created a perfect system, but the world is royally messed up. The world is royally messed up…how can it be a perfect system? That’s the beauty of it: His system continues to work despite the world. There is no Plan B—His system works well whether in a perfect world or in a messed-up one. We just have often lost the ability to see the goodness and perfection because we're blinded by the evil and pain.