Why do bad things happen in the world?

So, One questions missionaries get asked are questions along the lines of "If God is there, why do bad things happen?" or "Why do bad things happen to good people."

It is true that alot of bad things happen in the world even to people who do alot of good in the world. And if God is so loving why does he allow these things to happen. There are several reasons why this happens which can be answered by principles of the Gospel.

The first being something we call agency, or Our ability to choose what we do. Everyone on the earth makes decisions, God will judge each one of us based on the decisions we make with the understanding of right or wrong that we have. God will not force anyone to do anything because if he did, he would be taking away the only thing that is ours which is our freedom to act for ourselves(2 Nephi 2:26).

God has given us the way to live in harmony with eachother, and this can be found in the scriptures which is the commandments. By following these commandments the world would be a happier place where people get along together. There are many people who ignore God's commandments and because of this people suffer. This suffering is caused by people and would be fixed if we all tried our best to follow what God has asked us to do.

There is a lot of suffering however that is not caused by people. There is Illness, natural disasters and all kinds of things that cause distress for people, So Why does God allow these things to happen?

When God put us here on the earth, He placed us here to learn and gain experiances for ourselves. Some of the most important things we learn come through the more difficult things we experiance in this life. The difficulties we face in life are hard, and everyone experiances difficulties. What is important is how we deal with these difficulties.

The story of Job in the Bible teaches this principle. Job was a man who had a good life. He had many worldly treasures and most importantly a belief in God. God allowed satan to tempt Job, To take away everything he has except his life, to see what Job would do.

When Job lost everything his friends beliefs that he was cursed of God and that he had done something wrong, This was not true. God allowed these things to happen to see if Job was willing to do what God wants him to do even when things are not going his way. He stayed faithful dispite the terrible things that he faced.

When facing the many difficulties in life, there are two things to keep in mind, The first being the promise from God that we will never be given trials that we cannot handle (1 Corinthians 10:13) And the second is that the difficulties we face in this life will not compare to the reward that God has in store for us in the next life. (Romans 8:16-18)