Why Did Lazarus Have to Die?
As we shake hands, Anne Graham Lotz notes with a smile that for the second year in a row, we’re meeting in a bar in New York–not the place you’d expect to keep an appointment with Billy Graham’s daughter, a well-known evangelist and Bible scholar in her own right. Lotz is distinctively Southern, elegantly dressed and admirably serene for someone who’s been taping a “Today” show segment all morning. But she has her father’s immediacy and modesty, which makes a conversation about Jesus–even in the saloon of a Times Square hotel–seem as natural as church on Sunday. You’ve been writing books that offer comfort lately. I hadn’t thought of them as comfort books. This one comes out of where I am. I have one particular unanswered prayer–several actually, but this one I’ve been praying for months and years–and I believe I am praying rightly, but God hasn’t answered. So, why? Not blaming Him, just “God, why?” That opened my mind to other whys: Why do bad things happen? Why does evil sometim
