Twice yesterday, I heard social commentary where one comedian then a renowned physicist spoke about an unfair God. Each stated they had cast off the idea of an omnipotent
and omniscient power because they could not accept the suffering of life. Their
perspective seemed to be that a benevolent, loving God would not create a world
of such suffering as this.
I thought this way for many years. How could God allow
abuse, addiction, cataclysmic events that kill thousands? Until I came to
believe, “why not?” Did the scriptural authors tell us that creation meant no pain? Sometimes
I wonder if the Adam and Eve story is where the breakdown occurred. Were we
created in His image to be without suffering until we ate from the “tree of
knowledge”?
It came to me that this conundrum is much like marriage.
Early we are saturated with desire and full of hope so we marry and have a
honeymoon. There is usually a period of relative bliss until life begins to
happen. We encounter problems and pain. “We” being the optimum word here. We
move through it all together. At times we grow apart. Then at other times we
grow closer. If we stick it out (for better or worse) we come to realize that
all of it has taught us many lessons. We have grown stronger. We now “love” one
another.
When he was 11 years old my son was diagnosed with
bone cancer. It was horrifying. I can’t say there were no moments when I was
angry with God. There were. Yet when all was said and done I came to a place of
painful acceptance rather soon. “Bouncing molecules”, I heard myself say.
God didn’t attack my son or my family. It was literally
cellular. Some cells that all of us carry dormant triggered and became active
producing a tumor. The year of chemo threatened to kill him. My prayer was that
his suffering ease, however that looked. My wife has shared that her prayer was
that he survive.
He has survived yet with many challenges. We did too. As a result,
I found that I was closer to God as I understood him beyond any place I had
been before. Early morning on the greenway outside the hospital I would run
into the rising sun communing with God and His creation. Life and death were
near in each breath. One morning as I returned on the path I looked up to his
floor … his window. The sun was bathing the side of the mostly glass children’s’
hospital. In golden light there was a cross. I know our minds will
play tricks. I kept looking as I struggled for air. The cross did not dim. It
has not faded still.
My wife and I are still married. My son works alongside me
now. He’s a bit cranky and hurts quite a bit yet full of spit and vinegar. Not
long past he sat at my desk.
“I’d like to start going back to church, I think, Dad.”
He’s never uttered a negative word about God. If anybody has
a right to be mad and or disillusioned, I’d say it was him.
Through it all my family persevered. I would say that
overall, we are better for it. There are scars and cracks for sure. I think the
Muslim poet Rumi spoke to it all best:
“The wound is the place where the light enters you”
No doubt life is full of pain and sorrow. It is unfair and
often devastating. Is God punishing us? Why would a benevolent God allow such
things?
I suspect he created order from the chaos. We … this reality … are his thought and his love. There’s good and bad. I suspect what matters is
how we deal with it.
I have often imagined a black American slave woman toiling
in the boiling southern sun of a cotton field, singing gospel hymns in praise
and wonder, smiling to the Father of her heart and salvation and I know:
“Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and
all the rest will be made unto you. “
Matthew 6:33
I feel sort of bad for those commentators and all who feel the same. In resentment I too once
threw “the baby out with the bathwater”. I once despised what I perceived to be
an unjust God.
That’s when I learned what real suffering was.
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