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By Melissa Lauber

When I was a child, I used to hate the verse from the King James Bible, "Suffer the little children to come unto me."

In my mind, I did the translation. Children shouldn't suffer. Jesus was good. He wanted the children to sit and be with him. But that verse came to mind as I read a story of suffering being lived out in Lusby.

On Sept. 30, the front page of the Washington Post, told the story of a 7-year-old girl in a nightgown and pigtails, wandering the streets in Calvert County. She hadn't eaten for three days, she told a neighbor. She looked battered.

The police were called. When they investigated, they found in the girl's home where she lived with her adopted mother, the bodies of two other children in a freezer.

Police believe they were the girl's sister and another adopted child, ages 9 and 11. The also believe that these bodies may have been in that freezer for more than a year.

In the Post, it mentions that the Board of Child Care, which is affiliated with the Baltimore-Washington Conference, worked as a private contractor with the District of Columbia's Child and Family Services Agency.

The Board of Child Care, according to a press release from the organization, performed an initial adoption study, which included an FBI background check, a Maryland State Clearance Check, a Prince George's County Child Abuse Clearance check and approval by the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children.

Everything was done according to well-defined regulations; every i dotted; every t crossed. Yet evil exists. Little girls suffer.

Days later, I read in the Baltimore Sun about a woman who left her stillborn baby in a dumpster at St. John's UMC in Baltimore.

The suffering multiples.

In the midst of this, I ran across a blog in the Dallas Morning News exploring theodicy. How do people of faith deal with suffering?

One man, Gerald Britt, told about his 11-year old son's death, followed by the death of another son in a domestic dispute and then a week after that funeral, his diagnosis of prostate cancer.

Britt's faith helped him in two ways, he wrote, "First it taught me the insufficiency of answers.

"Secondly," Britt said, "I choose to stubbornly believe that God is good. The Book of Psalms is punctuated throughout with these words: ‘the Lord is good....' and there are no qualifiers."

God is not good if, when, or as long as...." God is just good and Britt chooses to "cling to that unqualified goodness," even when the things that happen to him are not good.

Within the Baltimore-Washington Conference, there is a woman with this same spirit. Sally Ransom Knecht believes that God is good and she teaches that to other people.

She tends to amaze me. A member of Towson UMC, Sally was married to the Rev. Lewis F. Ransom, who was murdered in 1987.

She knows by heart the effects of violence, the pain of a trial, and how to remember and honor the past while still moving on with life.

For a number of years, she organized and directed a support group of homicide survivors, obtained an initial grant for the work, led seminars in coping with this kind of loss and counseled survivors.

In trying to make sense of today, I turned to her for answers. How should United Methodists make sense of this suffering?

But she surprised me by gently refocusing my thoughts.

"When tragedy strikes, such as the heinous event of the past days, it is natural to attempt to find a reason for this violent and transgressive tragedy," she wrote in an e-mail. "Our anger may surface toward the one responsible and we are sad for the loss of the two children and the hurt of a third. We are frustrated and depressed and cry out for justice.

"But there is no easy answer to the ‘why' and we feel helpless. In time we may learn more of the why but that will not change what has happened."

So what can congregations and individuals do? Knecht responded with some spiritually practical suggestions:

• Acknowledge the truth, with a sense of shock and anger.
• Know that questions are natural, and that answers will be limited.
• Your reaction to this event may bring up in your mind the dark shadows of different times in your life.
• Share your feelings and try to understand the feelings of others.
• Take care of yourself. Eat, rest, exercise, surround yourself with those you care about and those who care about you.
• Reclaim your power and accept who you are, taking responsibility for your life.
• Know healing will come to you through sharing, understanding and prayer.
• Pray also for the mothers. They, too, are children of God in need.

Then Sally offered this prayer:

"O Lord, we want to ask why this has happened, yet we put our trust in you that you will support, guide and direct us even at this time when we are bewildered, hurt for what has happened, and feel for the loss. Help us do something positive and helpful for the children.

May your love and spirit reach out to all in need and strengthen us to do your will. Amen."

It's a wonderful prayer, but for a while the only words I could pray in earnest were "help us, help us, help us, help us."

Then, when my spirits calmed I prayed her words again and found myself caught in another refrain: "Help us do something positive and helpful for the children."

Our Board of Child Care does that when it reaches out to the 1,448 children and youth each year, helping them to shape lives of healing and wholeness. Our churches do that when they embrace the 24,096 young people in Sunday School each week; and the conference does that when it brings more than 5,000 youth and their leaders to Ocean City for a revival every winter.

But now, maybe it's time for me to do something, for you do something. To reach out to one child in need. God's shown us the need. How will we respond? "Suffer, the little children to come unto us."