Why?

 

I spent New Year’s weekend with my wife’s family at her parent’s home. On Sunday morning at 4 a.m. I awoke to shouts and commotion in the hall. Jumping out of bed I could make out the words: “Fire…Garage.” My father-in-law had a detached garage where he stored not only his vehicles and boat but also his carpentry tools in a heated shop. When I looked out the window, flames were 20 feet into the air. Three beloved family pets were dead, and the garage was reduced to smoking rubble within minutes.

One of the nicest ladies I know has breast cancer. In the process of diagnosing her cancer, her doctors also discovered advanced heart disease. Now she has the flu.

I recently read a note that was passed on to me by a member of my congregation. In it, a friend detailed the financial strains her husband’s health condition had placed them under and the sense of hopelessness that she was experiencing.

In each of these experiences I couldn’t help but recall the question that men and women have asked for millennia, “Why?” or more specifically, “Why God?” It’s a common reaction to tragedy to blame God or question his goodness. In the midst of a life-changing event, even Christians who otherwise might seem to have it all figured out waver. Skeptics doubt, “If there is a good and loving God, why is there so much suffering in the world?”

Christians haven’t always been consistent in how they talk about God’s role in the tragedy. Because God is all-powerful, some Christians get the idea that God has planned out everything – suffering, pain, and even evil. Some suggest that God rewards the good with good things in life and the wicked he punishes. Other Christians say that tragedies are inflicted by God as a means of teaching us a lesson. At the other extreme are those who postulate an enfeebled God who wants to help but is just unable to.

When the writer of Genesis says God pronounced his creation “good,” part of what he meant was that God created a world imbued with amazing natural processes that most of the time benefit us. But the same natural process that allows us to enjoy a campfire sometimes results in garages being burnt down. Sometimes people make mistakes, or wood stoves fail, or creosote builds up in chimneys and fires start. But God didn’t do it.

I remember reading that the earth’s atmosphere is due in part to volcanic eruptions and that the tectonics that generate these eruptions are a result of the movement of molten rock. Now if the earth didn’t have a molten mantle with a spinning iron-nickel core we wouldn’t have a magnetic field either, and without earth’s magnetic field, incoming deadly radiation would render life on this planet impossible.

Yet tectonics are also behind earthquakes, and earthquakes sometimes kill people simply because they are at the wrong place at the wrong time. I suppose if God intervened and suspended the laws of nature all the time so that no one got hurt, concepts like “hurt” or the “value of life” would become meaningless. There would be no such thing as risk, and probably little caution. Is that the world I want to live in?

At a cellular level, I find it amazing that trillions of cell divisions are going on inside of my body even as I type this, and better than 99.99 percent of them happen without a glitch. Cells replace other cells, taking on vital functions in every part of my body. God is amazing!

But now and then an error occurs, and a cancer cell gets the wrong message and starts replicating with abandon forming a tumor. Rather than asking “Why?” when I think about it I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often! But God has also given us the ability to reason and learn. Through both modern medicine and prayer, my friend just may recover.

Another way to think about creation’s “goodness” is the idea that humans were created to live in harmony on the earth. God wanted us to love Him, and each other, but true love always includes the option to either love or not love, so God gave us the freedom to make choices – to do good, or to do evil, to accept God’s goodness and love, or reject it. As a result, sin has come into the world. That’s what Christians mean when they say that we live in a fallen world. It’s not a hypocritical judgment against anyone, it’s simply an observation – human choices for greed, power, and gain over and at the expense of others has resulted in tragedy throughout the world. The Apostle Paul speaks of all creation “groaning” as a result of sin. That’s the “flip-side” of human freedom. God’s not throwing thunderbolts; he’s weeping.

In one of the most important books of the Old Testament on this subject, Job is inflicted with horrible disasters and disease. His friends come to sit with him, but then ultimately begin asking him what he did to deserve such a fate. Job pleads his innocence, but they urge him to confess his sin so that God will end his torment. Then God shows up and says it just doesn’t work that way.

It’s precisely because we live in a fallen world that Jesus came to take the sin of the world upon himself and die on a cross. His death is in part a way to show us just how messed up we are, that when God did make an appearance among us, we crucified Him. But his death accomplished something we could never do on our own – it reconciled us with God. We will all face death someday, and it is for this existential reality that Jesus came.

If God doesn’t cause tragedy, and he doesn’t intervene to prevent it, he also doesn’t abandon me. He walks alongside me through the most difficult times. He invites me to trust Him. He assures me that this life isn’t the end. As a Christian, I have a role to play in demonstrating that love to my neighbors, in being God’s tangible shoulder to cry on, in being His hands and feet for those in need. Here in this life, God can use tragedy and pain for good. He can take it and fold it and mold it to become the threshold for a new chapter. But it takes faith to say “Jesus I trust you, I want to live my life for you, I want my choices in life to be led by you,” and then to remember that no matter what He’s got you.

Each month a member of the Cook County Ministerium will offer Spiritual Reflections. This week our contributor is Daren Blanck, pastor of Zoar Church in Tofte, a teacher at William Kelley High School and a student of Beyond the River Academy, a ministry program of Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ.