Why had God taken my best friend?
An awful thing he’d done to me.
I needed John more than He did,
A loving God would surely see.

A world that is full of sinners,
He could have taken one of those.
Or the beggar on the corner
With the pathetic smelly clothes?

My best friend John was full of love,
A life of service carefully planned.
His passage bought, all set to go,
To serve God in a foreign land.

No loving God could be so cruel,
A thing that I could not forgive.
Why did he take a Christian’s life
And let so many sinners live?

As I sat there in abject sorrow,
Wrapped up in pity for myself,
I noticed the aquarium
That I had placed on my bookshelf.

I saw the guppy that I’d picked
To be used in my perfect plan.
His large tail, so brightly colored,
In the shape of a fancy fan.

I got my net and caught him out.
He was the one that I would need.
The one to improve the color
Of all the guppies that I breed.

Right then a thought occurred to me,
I had no clue what God had planned.
When I caught out my perfect fish,
The others didn’t understand.

This is a poem that I wrote after our young pastor passed away. His death was especially hard on the youth of the church. He had been the youth pastor before becoming the senior pastor and all of the young people loved him. A woman in our Sunday school class asked how to explain God’s taking of our pastor, to her daughter. Her daughter had asked why God took a person with so much potential and left another person in the church who was retarded. I knew that her daughter kept tropical fish and I told her to use them as an illustration. I came home and wrote this poem. Maybe it will be of help to you some day, when it comes your time to explain why God allowed the loss of a friend.