“God is good …All the time!
And all the time …God is Good!”

Ah, the call and response of a faithful people. We like knowing how to respond. But do we believe it? Is God really good all the time? for the parent who’s just lost a child? for the man who’s just received a dire diagnosis? for the teen who is bullied, the wife who is abused? what of the family without a home? the children who live in fear? The list goes on and on.

Is God really all that good? Certainly a good God would have none of this.

Recently, I attended a funeral service for my friend Bill. He had been a good husband, good father, good son, good uncle, good friend, good businessman, and, by all accounts, a good Christian. His family suffered with him through nine months of brain cancer before they lost him. Is God still good?

What is good? According to me, it’s an outcome; it’s a judgment; it’s the feeling I have when everything goes my way. On those days I chime right in: God is good all the time and all the time God is good. But Bill and his family and friends remind me that that’s not the good that God is.

God is love; that’s way more than good. God made this substitution, so we can know that:

• God is patient.
• God is kind.
• God does not envy, does not boast, is not proud.
• God is not rude or self-seeking.
• God is not easily angered and keeps no record of wrongs.
• God does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.

This God I can actually see in those circumstances of sorrow and hurt and pain and loss. There may be no good in any of those, but there is God. God is so much better than good.

More than this, love is not just what God is but what God does.

• God always protects.
• God always trusts.
• God always hopes.
• God always perseveres.

Since Love does that, so can we, if we believe in love. God is there, no matter the circumstance, providing what we need to respond in love to the one who is in need. When we offer protection and trust, and when we hold onto hope that perseveres, we are in love. Love never fails.

God is so much better than good. God does good, in and through us, when we let God.

At Bill’s memorial service, a man came to the pulpit to share memories of their longtime friendship.  “People come into our lives for one of four reasons,” the man began. “To add, subtract, multiply or divide. Bill was an add-er.”

Oh my yes. Bill added so much; and somehow, there in the saddest of circumstances, it seemed that what Bill added, God was multiplying. Love is like that.