I am so happy to hear that your leg is better. I’m certain the cast is a great nuisance, and I know the itching can be terrible, but Papa says that if you are patient and allow the leg to heal fully, it will be as strong as it was before.

I was curious to know if your leg has kept you from activities and so has caused you to spend more time in thought? I wonder because your letter was filled with such deep and hard thoughts. And you ask such difficult questions! (I think you are quite different, Matthew McCallum, than when you first came to visit us!)

Well, I cannot say I understand all of it, or even most of what you ask, but I will tell you what I think. I have thought about this a lot since I first read your letter. I think perhaps I have always thought those thoughts at different times, like when bad things happen or when an animal dies, but I’ve never spoken them aloud. Maybe I’ve been afraid to.

I think you are asking about something that must be the hardest thing of all about God to understand. Why didn’t God make everything good and perfect and full of love, just like himself? Sometimes I wish so hard that would be so.

Well, it confuses me as much as it confuses you. Papa wouldn’t tell me the answer, or rather, he said I already knew the answer, but I am not so sure. I wish you could just be here, and we both could talk with him! He can make everything seem so sensible. But maybe he would then tell the two of us the same riddle he told me. So, in any case, it seems that you’ll have to put up with my attempt at explaining things I don’t even understand!

One thing I have believed for a long time is that God made everything good. I simply cannot make myself think that God would create bad things, or even bad people. I believe that it all got started with the devil, who refused to obey God. And from the devil, the whole world has gotten infected. So when you ask the question, “Why does God allow wrong in the world?” my answer is that really he doesn’t. I think he created people to be good, but that somehow however good we try to be, we fall short and wind up doing bad things.

But it was your other question that I had the most trouble with: Why doesn’t God make people behave better? Why doesn’t he just make us all be good? Why doesn’t he just keep us away from doing bad things or things that hurt us? I have often thought that everything would be so much better if that were so.