Sometimes there seems to be injustice everywhere you look.

Certainly, it’s very evident in our world today, with children starving and left like garbage, mistreated and forgotten elderly, or things like this week when that little 6-year-old boy was suspended for kissing his little girlfriend’s hand.

Seriously. What in the WORLD?

But there are days when you see it in your personal world, too, effecting people that you know, respect and love. They are dealt an outlandish hand, so incredibly wrong and undeserved that you can hardly believe it’s really happened. If you’re human, it makes you furious. You rumble it around and around in your mind trying to see any sense at all in it, and then, if you’re really honest, it shakes the earth a little where it once seemed solid because, hey, if it can happen to them…

In the midst of my own anger-fest over the injustice dealt to a friend yesterday, I had a new appreciation wash over me for the rough and tumble crew of men whom Christ called friend. His closest buddies. His disciples. They’d followed Him all around, watched Him teach people, heal people and love on people, and they’d come to love Him themselves. Then, suddenly, He’s taken away from them and charged as a common criminal.

Seriously. What in the WORLD?

I have no doubt their ground was shaking. I’m sure they, too, were furious and trying desperately to see any sense at all in the fact that their beloved friend was hanging on a cross before their very eyes because He had done what He was supposed to do. He had shined light into darkness, and brought truth to trump law, but while those things were vitally necessary to overcome evil and wrongdoing, the exposure caused division and fear…and an unjust verdict handed down to an innocent man.

Just like my friend.

Like Christ’s buddies before me, there is also nothing I can do to change what’s happened. In His case, that injustice was allowed to happen because it had to, to complete a plan God had put in motion for the greater good. So, I’m believing the same for my friend. There is purpose in this that I can’t see, so in the midst of the anger and uncertainty, I’m believing it to be a righteous injustice.

And through that lens, InJUSTiCe God at work.

“For I know the plans I have for you,” says the Lord. “They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.” Jeremiah 29:11 NLT