Love

I was thinking about how I've been seeing that the love of God is EVERYTHING. However, I often say that with reservation, because I feel like I'll sound like those warm-fuzzy people who believe that God would never tell anyone that what they were doing was wrong if it made them feel good, would never send someone to hell, etc. The kind of people whose faith is dramatically shaken if a natural disaster strikes or if God doesn't do what they want. Suddenly you hear, "How could a loving God allow such and such to happen?"
I've always answered such people by telling them that our concept of love is so different from God's. We know that He's loving, but sometimes our definition of love doesn't match His. But just like my last post, sometimes I feel we Christians use that as a cop-out, because we really don't understand how a loving God could have allowed the Holocaust, or Katrina, or the tsunami. Then I realized for me to think that way, I haven't read my Bible well.
It's easy to see how a loving God delivered His people out of Egypt and completely destroyed their enemies. But that same loving God allowed them to be enslaved for 400 years. What was up with that? A loving God found a man after His own heart and made him king over Israel, ushering in a golden era for them. But that same loving God allowed that man to have to flee for his life for ten years. A loving God wanted so desperately to make a way for us to be with Him, but he allowed His Son to sacrifice Himself in the most unspeakable torture imaginable to accomplish this task. If I cling to the world's definition of love, how can i look at these contradictions and have any faith left in a "loving God?"
I think the answer lies in the fact that the Bible covers over 6000 years of time, while we live in a moment. When a little girl lives in a fairy tale, she often dreams of the handsome prince and the beautiful palace. But most of the time, those things come at the end of the story. Snow White was kicked out of her home and forced to live in a cottage that couldn't have had the conveniences she was used to. Cinderella worked for years before she got her big break. But discounting exceptions such as "A Little Princess," girls like to dream of the happy ending.
I think we Christians can approach the Bible the same way. We see the happy endings, but don't like to think about the journey. But there's so much more to the Bible than a fairy tale, because the story's not done. We are living in that story, adding on to it. What the Bible shows us is a picture of the journey we all go through, and that journey has ups and downs. It's supposed to show us that whether things are going well or poorly, the hand of God is controlling it all. And though we don't have the capacity to understand how all the events in the Bible were loving, God showed us enough of the outcome for us to realize that He orchestrated everything for His good purpose out of His great love for mankind. Just like the people in the Bible, we might have times of a "happy ending," where we feel God is finally acting like we think He should. But again, just like those in the Bible, the journey continues.
God's not just in the "happy ending." He's in every moment. And though I might not always understand how, I can look at the lives of those who have gone before me and see that He is love.