About a week ago a young eight year old boy by the name of Cody Smith died. He had a rare type of brain cancer and when the tumor was removed it was found it had gone too far and he would not be able to survive it. The whole town rallied around the family. He got to meet the Maple Leafs his favorite Hockey team, and money was raised for his medical bills. He was loved dearly, but he died! Is that fair? 

Fairness is a difficult concept to really understand isn’t it? We all think we understand it, but we don’t. Just watch two teams arguing about it when there is a dubious call in sports, or listen to two adults having marital difficulties arguing, or consider how different others judge things compared to ourselves!

Fairness is different depending on your specific view of what is being judged. 

We all consider fairness to be the situation when we are un-biased, not showing favoritism, or being free of deception. The problem is that as people we are very opinionated, and those opinions come from our backgrounds which are different resulting in different measuring sticks to be used when we get faced with a situation we need to judge. 

That’s why law developed. We could not agree to agree and had to make rules or guidelines to help us clearly state what our assumptions and agreements are against which we would do our judging. The problem with laws is that they never really work. Think of how much money lawyers make by twisting and distorting laws to get what their clients want! That itself is often not considered fair! 

So let’s agree that we really don’t have the ability as an individual to understand what fair is. It would take knowledge of everyone's perspectives and the truth of the situations to be able to decide what fair is! We just don’t have it. Our courts do the best they can and even they sometimes fail and put the wrong guy or girl behind bars. To be fair we would just have to have too much information, more than we could comprehend or is available to us! 

That’s why only God can judge correctly. He has all this information! He know both the past, the present and the options of the future. All that is taken into account when he judges. And his advice to us is not to judge, but leave it to him.  

"If you do not judge others, then you will not be judged. If you do not find others guilty, then you will not be found guilty. Forgive, and you will be forgiven.”[1] 

Good advice! It hints that we will be judged with the measuring stick we use to judge others. God will provide our judgment using our own views, but within his supremely correct overall view of truth! So we need to be careful saying what is fair or not!

 Let’s be honest, we all have to use our judgment to live each day. Every moment of every day we make decisions. We cannot not judge, and we need to try and be as fair as possible! This is good, but we must be very careful of judging God himself since we cannot start to understand what he does. 

If Cody had lived, what might have happened to him later in life. Could it perhaps have been nastier than the illness which destroyed him (as a side note, the illness in the world was the result of bad decisions by ancient man and spirits and cannot be blamed on God). 

We all have a special purpose in life. That’s why we live! Not just to have fun! What is our true purpose? 

I have found that by listening to the words of the God of the universe, by reading his book, I get wholesome direction, understand his purpose for the day, and my judgments are based on his guidelines. That is the way I can get closest to a fair decision since the only one that really understand fair is God himself. By aligning with God I ensure I am as fair as I can be. 

Then, I can tearfully ask God to help those who are hurting, I can pray about apparent injustices and ask God to help because I know I am aligned with him. Forgiveness is more important than blame!