When I heard about the cyclone that hit Myanmar (Burma) and killed multiple thousands of people, the news dealt a severe blow to my already shaky faith this week. My previous post about doubt as a spiritual discipline is the sanitized version of how hard it hit me. You see, I’m in the midst of some suffering in my extended family that makes no sense. Some people I love are dealing with horrendous consequences of choices they’ve made, but honestly, their choices have been no worse than some of the ones I’ve made in the course of my life.
I tried to apply a sort of spiritual checklist to see why God would allow those consequences in their lives. The checklist approach doesn’t work all that well. Some have repented and turned to Jesus, and they’re suffering as much as the those who haven’t.
I think I’m beginning to understand Job. You might take this with a grain of salt, saying I haven’t lost everything like Job–so how can I understand? The answer, I think, is that such loss can’t be measured in quantity.The story of Job was told in such cataclysmic terms, perhaps, because life was so brutal and short in the time the book was written, most people had experienced the loss of wives in childbirth, children to illness, and homes and livestock to calamities.
In the course of my life (and my husband’s), death has stolen spouses, babies, mothers and fathers prematurely. It’s no less painful to see the fullness of life and its potential stolen from people we love whose lives are strained and broken.
So when the image of countless corpses floating in floodwaters after a freak storm is juxtaposed on the image of people I know and love who are suffering, my mind and spirit reel and will not accept platitudes about God being in the midst of our suffering, or using suffering to test our faith, or even having a plan that’s bigger than it all. Sweeping generalizations might help us cope with the abstract horror, but they’re no comfort to the people whose lives were cut short , or worse yet, those are still living the horror.
Job came to the very end of his faith. But he remained faithul.
And I’m not ashamed to say that’s where I am today. I’m stripped of all my labels, categories, certainties. I’m not sure I know God at all, but here’s the clincher: I can’t take my eyes off Jesus. I don’t want to believe in a God who would allow 100,000 people to drown in one day, and let people I love suffer and lose everything–but I can’t stop trusting in Jesus. He was willing to die–not just for sin in an abstract, spiritual sense, but to show us how to disarm sin in its present, physical reality–with love.
You could put all my belief in this nutshell: if it doesn’t look like Jesus, I don’t think it’s really God.
So, if I don’t seem too excited about debates over how to make the church relevant in music and programming, whether or not Genesis 1-3 is literal science, whether or not women can teach men, or if there are five points on the TULIP, if Roman Catholics and Lutherans and Methodists are really saved, and a couple of other hot topics I wouldn’t even dare post on this blog–don’t worry about me.
I’m just back at square one. Jesus said, “Follow me.” And I know even if I don’t know what to believe, I can trust him and remain faithful.
*Note: Thursday’s Child refers to a line in the poem “Monday’s Child:
“Thursday’s child has far to go.”
As a child born on a Thursday, I’m using it as a metaphor for how far I have to go in spiritual formation.
Posted on May 8th, 2008 by Kathy
Filed under: Thursday's Child | 7 Comments »