Healing the sick

You know what, I'm gonna throw something else out there. Why the heck doesn't G-d just heal the sick and be done with it?

I'm sure I'm not alone when I say this, but I'm tired of praying so hard for someone's health and well-being and nothing, the illness just keeps taking more and more of him. What the f*ck? It would be so easy for G-d to slow down its progress, do something, even just make breathing a little easier, life a little brighter. And I'm not even family, so if He doesn't want to listen to me, at least He could listen to the man's family. And no one even has to know it was G-d who helped, it could just be deemed a medical miracle or a minor improvement. Any improvement is better than nothing.

And I know prayer is not so much for G-d's benefit, but rather a kind of gift to help us improve our own characters and reason out our problems on our own...but why the heck can't it mean something more for once? How am I supposed to believe in a G-d that has intervened in past history, but who no longer cares enough to heal suffering people in the present, even just in small ways? In a G-d who doesn't prevent genocide, who allows the Holocaust, who allows Darfur, who allows massacres and meaningless destruction?

I know humans have free will, and thus the ability to choose good or bad and therefore control our own lives and actions (to some extent). And I do believe that bad events can result from bad human decisions or just from fate, chance, whatever you want to call it. There are indeed many things that we cannot explain and cannot understand -- the suffering of innocent victims is definitely one of these things. But I still do not understand why a compassionate G-d does not seem to listen to our most deeply felt prayers and supplications on behalf of others. How can He not feel? How can He not care? Or perhaps He does feel, but also feels powerless to intervene, but how then, can He be G-d, capable of anything? Or perhaps this is just an anomaly I will never understand, something completely beyond the realm of human comprehension. Perhaps this is so, but I'm not happy with that answer.

It is true that illness and natural disasters can unite us in ways nothing else can, and can emphasize quite clearly what's really important in life. But for what price? How many innocent lives are taken in the process? These things cannot be justified, just as I can find no human justification for G-d's apparent indifference to such matters. Then again, I am not G-d so I cannot know the why...but I'm still not happy about it.