Dearest Taylor... I’m sitting here at
your computer, tapping out the staggered rhythms of my heart on keys that once felt the touch of
your fingers... Over seven months have passed since you died, yet every day I wake up and feel it
incredible that you are not here... I do miss you terribly. –BRUCE VAUGHN
individuals and
their life stories are real.)
The invitations were sent weeks ago, and now the guests are arriving.
One by one they enter my home and are escorted into my living room. They are
here at my request, but not one of them knows the reason. They have never met
the other invitees sitting around them, so they have no idea how much they have
in common.
The first to arrive, forever punctual, is Bruce Vaughn. A dear college
friend, his life was turned upside-down in the early 1990s when his
five-year-old son was diagnosed with lymphoma. After two years of hopes being
raised and then dashed, Taylor succumbed to the disease due to complications
from a bone marrow transplant. His death, which I witnessed from a distance but
experienced up close through conversations with Bruce, gave me a new
perspective on life that has never since left me. Now, as a Christian counselor
in Nashville, my gentle friend—one of the smartest and most consistent men I
have ever known—lives in the long shadow cast by Taylor’s death.
The next to arrive is Oscar Whitt, my brother-in-law and likewise my
friend. Today an engineer for the Boeing Corporation, he has lived the past
thirty years of his life facing suffering and sorrow at every turn. As a senior
in college Oscar lost his only brother in a terrible automobile accident. The
two boys had been such close friends, almost inseparable during childhood. A
few years later Oscar’s father died when his truck collided with livestock that
had wandered into the road. More recently—almost unfathomable is the
sequence!—his mother was diagnosed with an aggressive form of lung cancer.
Though determined to beat the disease, she died within a few months. Oscar now
finds himself the lone surviving member of his immediate family. And all of
this before he reached his mid-forties. Today, in gloriously ironic fashion, he
and his wife have taken on the enormous task of adopting and raising three
brothers, now ages fourteen, twelve, and ten. For Oscar, the task at hand is to
mold a new family while he grieves the loss of the old.
Shortly after Oscar is seated, Jessica Seay joins the group. She was
one of my youngest daughter’s high school teachers before taking an extended
leave of absence. The reason was the untimely death of her husband. A handsome
and hard-working young man, he became infected with a very aggressive bacteria
known as MRSA, and it took his life in a matter of days. My daughter has told
me how close the couple was, how Jessica bragged about him while in the school
cafeteria. Adding to the tragedy, Jessica now is left with the challenge of
parenting their young daughter, not even a year old when her father died. As
you can expect, the turn of events has almost paralyzed her very existence.
Still today she struggles in its aftermath to make sense of life again.
My fourth guest, Kelly Clem, enters next. Although we have never
before met, I feel that I know her. I saw her for the first time on Palm
Sunday, 1994. The minister of a small Methodist church in Piedmont, Alabama,
she was being interviewed that afternoon by local and national news reporters,
all seeking her response to the terrible tragedy that had unfolded earlier that
day. A fierce tornado had ripped through the church during the worship service,
collapsing the building. Victims of the storm included several little children
sitting in the front pews awaiting their turn to participate in the service.
Reverend Clem, I remember all so well, bravely held herself together as she
tried to answer the unanswerable. Why did this happen? Why a church? Why little
children? She spoke of holding on, of faith in the midst of a storm, of a God
who embraces us in our hurt, and of the responsibility of other humans to act
as community to her grieving congregation. What made Kelly Clem’s demeanor so
unbelievable (and her words so believable) was the fact that her young daughter
was one of those who had perished that morning. Somehow this mother suppressed
her own grief until she could minister to the grief of her congregation and
speak to the nation at large. Seen from the perspective of one who has two
daughters of his own, what she did that day was one of the most courageous,
selfless, sacrificial deeds I have ever witnessed.
The final visitor to arrive is you, and you soon find yourself sitting
in the same room with the four mentioned above. When you hear their stories,
you wonder aloud what you could possibly have in common with them. The scope
and depth of their suffering seem so great and yours so small. Surely, you tell
me, I have made some sort of mistake. My reply is that you are here because you
too have experienced suffering. You have personally felt the pain and injustice
of life, although perhaps in smaller measure. You have witnessed tragedies at
home and abroad that have brought tears to your eyes and questions to your
mind. And you live each day with the stark realization that you are just one
heartbeat removed from suffering the likes of which my other guests have
endured.
After everyone is comfortably seated and the customary introductions
are completed, I take a seat with all of you and begin to share from my heart:
The main reason you
are here, and not others, is a sense of comradeship I have with you. Your
particular life stories have greatly influenced
my life and have impacted this book at every turn of the page. As I have
pondered the nature of God, each of you in this room has crossed my mind more
than once. I have tried to keep foremost in my thoughts the suffering you have
endured. This has made me hesitate and reconsider when I have been tempted to
oversimplify God’s nature or be too presumptuous about Him. Each of you is a
reminder to me that life is not simple and that faith in God is not simple either. In a way, you have
been my system of checks and balances, my fulcrum, my course adjuster along
this leg of my journey.
I think I owe it to
each of you, even before this book is published, to share what I have discovered.
Without knowing it, you have been a part of my religious experience, a
guidepost on my journey. I want to return the favor by letting you have a
glimpse of what I have learned about God. It matters not whether you agree with
my conclusions. Only two things of merit concern me: that you are made aware of
my debt to you for any answers I have found and of my deepest empathy for you
in the present
as you continue to deal with the past.
What I have been
unable to answer for myself and will be unable to answer for you are the “why”
questions. Why your loved one? Why not you or me instead? Why not the reprobate
down the street? Why not a preemptive act from God? Why not, in a display of
divine power and love, an end to your terrible ordeal? These questions are
usually the first to surface when tragedy strikes. I have discovered that they
are also the longest to linger, simply because they are the toughest to answer.
And I find myself in no position to shed any further light. As plainly and
humbly as I can say it, I still do not know why. I am no nearer an answer at
this stage of my journey than I was when I started.
What I have been
able to piece together, at least in part, are some of the “who” questions. Who
is this God over me and the universe? Is He a God of undiluted love, power, and
knowledge or a God limited in one or more of these areas? Whom do we worship or
refuse to worship each Sabbath or Sunday? Does He know our hurt? Does He care?
Is He available to help us? God, who are You? These questions, outgrowths of
the unanswered “why,” are the principal subject of this book, and I want to
relay to you the answers I have found.
The knee-jerk
reaction to suffering seems to be to limit God in some way. Some would limit
His power. Since He has not acted to prevent suffering or to relieve it, God
must be limited in what He can do. But I have not been able to embrace this
explanation. The universe around me is so laden with power that I cannot fathom
the power of its Creator being anything but infinite. So when you ask me if God
could have acted to prevent what each of you went through, my answer is, “Yes,
He could have.” Those hands, strong enough to create this universe, certainly
could have protected you from suffering the way you did, even from suffering at
all. I offer no glib answer in an effort to defend God. If you are expecting me
to minimize His power to make an excuse for your plight, then you will be
disappointed. In fact, I would encourage you to do just the opposite, to raise
your perception of the power of God to heights yet unimagined. That is the God
Job came to know, and that is who God is to me.
Nor should we try
to deal with our suffering by limiting His love. The depth of human love is to
me inexhaustible. The love of God, its source, must likewise be beyond measure.
The same can be said of His knowledge. If the complexity of the universe is any
indication, God knows more than any of us ever dreamt He could know. Any
attempt, therefore, to distance God from your suffering by saying He doesn’t
care or is unaware is futile. He knows full well your circumstances and loves
you in the midst of them. Yes, He even suffers with you, for the suffering
dimension of His love is boundless as well. Again, I would ask you to expand
the borders of God’s love and knowledge to regions yet unexplored. Better yet,
I would ask you to consider His love and knowledge to have no boundaries
whatsoever. That is the God Paul came to know, and that is who God
is to me.
And so the trend
continues. With each attempt to limit one of God’s attributes, I reply that the
wrong road has been taken. An about-face is in order. Limiting God is not the
answer, for that is not who God is. If He is sovereign (a Committee of One on
how the universe is run), then He is completely sovereign. If He is moral,
righteous, and holy, He is absolutely so. If He is omnipresent, then there is
nowhere, not even that silent place in the midst of grief, from which He is
ever removed. If He is just, then there can be no limit to His fairness and no
doubt that justice will come. If He is purposeful, then it is impossible—given
the scope of His power, love, knowledge, sovereignty, righteousness, and
justice—for His purpose to be denied. It is impossible for you and me, in spite
of appearances in the present, to miss what He has planned for us. In summary,
what we need today is an elevation of the greatness of God in every dimension
rather than a limitation of Him in one. The result would be true revival.
Before such a God we would fall on our knees in awe and repentance and arise in
understanding and service. That is the God Isaiah came to know, and
that is who God is to me.
As to the “what”
questions, let me offer my own answer. What should each of us, beset in
different measure by pain and suffering, do with the rest of our lives? What
should we do with what looms ahead of us that will give meaning to what lies
behind us? My advice to you is to place whatever has befallen you into the
hands of this great God and to trust like the rising of the sun that He will
make everything right. I firmly believe that God will reunite you with your
loved one, and it will seem then as if you had never been separated. You will
someday see God in all His glory, and—like Job, Paul, and Isaiah—your questions
will fade away. Your suffering and your God will no longer seem paradoxical. On
the other side you will be able to see God’s pattern yourself, and (as Dr.
Weatherhead phrased it) you will find your mistakes and your calamities and
your distress and your failures and all your pain woven therein. Then you will
say, “It is marvelous in my eyes!” In the interim, I pray that you may feel the
warmth of His powerful embrace and notice the tears on His compassionate face.
That is the God Jesus came to show, and that is who God is to me.
By capturing this
sense of God’s multi-faceted infinity, the question soon before you may not be
“why” or “what” but “where.” A renewed focus and a brand new life mission may
be the end result. You may again find inner peace and purpose, both derived
from the infinite peace and ultimate purpose of God.
As I complete these words to my guests, I am well aware that they have
already spoken them to me. Much of what I have said I learned from them. My
picture of a God of suffering love—and of hope in Him as our most valuable
possession—came straight from my personal discussions with Bruce Vaughn and
from some letters and speeches he wrote after Taylor’s death. I have already
alluded to the impact the words and deeds of Kelly Clem had on me as she
bravely ministered to her congregation and her nation that tragic day. Oscar
Whitt’s persistence and consistency in the face of suffering and his labor of
love for his three sons are nothing less than my advice already put into
practice. And Jessica Seay’s continued struggle to find meaning in a world
without her husband and best friend is a reminder to me that coping with
suffering is a process wrought with a suffering all its own. I am indebted to
these guests for teaching me about God and about life. I hope and pray that
something I said today may, in small portion, have returned the favor.
--This week's post is an excerpt from DEAR GOD, YOU SURE DON'T ACT LIKE YOU'RE ALIVE
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