The other day someone asked me a difficult question.  If, as Christianity says, God does all things to bring glory to himself, does that not make God selfish?
     Hmmm.  There are no easy answers.  We will always wonder and struggle with what we seek to define as the purposes of God.  My wife recently told me about a childhood friend of hers who recently revealed to her that her father, a deacon in the church, had sexually abused her throughout her childhood.  This is tragic.  Sure, it's a bent world, and sure, evil things happen, but why to this particular woman and not others?  And why at the hands of one who purports to be a lover of God?  Does this bring God glory?
     It's hard to see how.  Yet I'm not sure that God's apparent capriciousness (in this instance) is a case of him being selfish and allowing or doing whatever he wants for his "glory," but rather that it is a picture of God doing his best to bring together and resolve, in this life, the realities of sin and human choice and divine sovereignty and control.  God certainly knows our pain, and is acutely aware that this world is full of it.  He also knows that Jesus has met the pain and conquered the sin that ultimately spawns it.  Yet God also realizes (and I tread carefully in divining the mind of God) that we are still trapped in this existence without no way out, physically, other than death.
     That said, it's too easy to say that God has a plan, and it's too easy to say that what he knows overrides our ability to understand it--even if this is true.  On the other hand, we err if we try to embrace reality without admitting to mystery and questioning God; besides, I'm not sure that he wants us to not question him, anyway.  We are victims of our finitude.  We will always wonder.  Did not Jesus weep over the pain of Lazarus' survivors (see John 11)?  In the end, we go on in the darkness, trusting in, as difficult as it may be, in God's ultimate love for us.
     God's glory is that somehow, some way there is meaning.