Chris Sheeter and I were students at BJU and friends in 1981. Chris was tall, handsome, musical, with a great personality. He also was a good preacher. Chris was studying to pastor. We attended the same church, Southside Baptist Church and worked as waiters at the same Seafood restaurant, Old Mill Stream Inn. I graduated one semester before he did and started pastoring in N.C. and I drove back to Greenville, S.C. just to fellowship with Chris. During his last semester, he was a lifeguard at a local hotel. At the end of a shift, he dove in the pool just to swim across and go home. As he was swimming across the bottom, his friends notice he stopped about half way. Chris drowned.

Chris studied seven years, spent nearly $100,000 to prepare to pastor and never got to pastor one day. I remember asking myself, not out loud, why did God lead him to go through the rigors of four years of undergraduate work and the even tougher studies of three years of seminary and then allow this tragedy to happen?

William Safire, in a New York Times editorial, wrote after the 2004 India tsunami in which over 200,000 people were killed from 14 countries, “Where was God? Why does a good and all powerful deity permit such evil and grief to fall on innocent people? What did these people do to deserve such suffering.”

David Hume, the eighteenth century philosopher, connected the problem of evil and the existence of God: “Is He willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is impotent. Is He able but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Whence then is evil?”