48 hours ago my friend’s son dropped dead. Literally. Inexplicably.
Let that sink in.
She prays all the time. You’d think God would have warned her. If I were her, I’d be mad at him that he didn’t, and who knows how long that would have taken to sort out. Forever?
The reason I count the time in hours and not days is because that’s the way we count when we are faced with something that shakes the foundations of our soul. I’m sure she’s counting the time in minutes, or seconds. Or maybe she’s like I was after I lost someone that was precious to me – maybe she has lost all concept of time. The first time I reached out to her after I had heard the terrible news I wondered, as the phone was ringing, “Can she speak?” I have found myself wondering something more as time wears on. Can she live?
And predictably, all of this turmoil has gotten me thinking about my favorite subject: myself.
God promises us much less than we realize. People like to quote the passage from Jeremiah: “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.” But today I have been able to articulate to myself why that verse always has bugged me. That was a promise for a certain people, in a certain situation, in a certain time. Yet Christians extract it and apply it now. It’s not right, it’s not true, repeating it willy-nilly like that is almost a lie.
Almost. Why almost? Because I believe that God does have good in mind for us, and he says so later, in Romans. “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good.” But this is a little less of a promise than the Jeremiah passage. After all – who’s to define what good is, exactly? He is the judge of that, I am sure. All we know is that all things work together, and then God deems it good. Cold comfort, quite frankly.
I feel the need to defend God, here. He hates sin, and evil, and death. Those things aren’t good, he never said that they were. But they are here, they are what we contend with, they are part of the “all things” that are working together. My friend who lost her son knows her own mind, and I pity the fool that tries to tell her that God willed this to happen, that it’s a part of his ‘perfect plan.’ Those are stupid things to think, and even stupider to say. God doesn’t bring about death or evil. I know this, the Bible tells me so.
Jesus was different. He promises us suffering and hardship if we follow him. Thank God, someone was finally honest. Death and banal evil happen to us all, whether we believe that Jesus was God or not. But Jesus says that it will be worse for you if you believe in him, that somehow we become the target of evil in a whole new way. I appreciate him warning me about this, at least.
But here’s my point: one of my kids could drop dead tomorrow. There is no guarantee. Or alternatively, evil can come at any moment. Some evil is banal. Other evil is intentional and malicious, executed by people with horribly twisted minds. But it comes. He never promises that it won’t, he almost promises the opposite. And our lives are changed. We cannot ever get back what we had before, whether we lost our son, or our innocence, or our smug assumption that we would always have our sanity.
My friend’s loss makes me want to re-read the whole Bible, and make note of every promise that he ever makes and ALSO make note of all the context clues, so that I know what I’m dealing with, here. If a promise wasn’t meant for me, I don’t want to walk around believing I’m safe when I’m not. That’s what I used to do, I think, before my own personal experience with evil. Now I know a little better. But I don’t want to learn the hard way with everything. I don’t want to wait until I’ve lost my child before I realize that God never promised me that I wouldn’t.
He doesn’t promise to intervene according to our expectations. He doesn’t promise to undo the consequences of our sins – to restore our marriages we have ruined, for example. He doesn’t promise to keep gravity from working if we accidentally step off a cliff. He doesn’t promise to keep us well. He doesn’t promise to keep evil away. He doesn’t promise to answer our prayers. Without studying it, all I can think of is that he has promised to never leave us or forsake us. That’s it. He never promises us that we are safe, the way we think of safety. Is that enough?
I ask myself the question I ask for my friend. Can I live? Can I move forward in a world where children drop dead, fathers abuse their children, and sickness or death overtake us all? Some level of denial is healthy, it keeps us insulated and helps us to move on. But I feel stripped of that these days. There is loss and grief all around me, on every side. It hems me in. I am almost choking on it. My friends suffer and grieve, and I have too. I still grieve. There is already enough grief to last a lifetime, and I’m not even halfway through. (Naively assuming, of course, that I’ll make it to old age.)
Sometimes it seems to me that the proper response to all of this is simply to lay down and die. I feel that there is only so much one person can take. And I take comfort that this might be exactly what God did in the face of all of this: he just came down here and died. On this, God and I seem to agree.
I recently lost someone really important to me. Maybe permanently. I didn’t even realize I loved him until just before he was gone. I will tell you the truth: he felt like everything I have ever wanted. All wrapped up in one person. He felt like home. Or maybe I should say that he felt like I’ve always imagined home should feel. I used to dismiss the idea of soul mates, but I have quit mocking. He is terribly flawed, as am I, but it just didn’t matter: to me, he is everything lovely. Why is he gone? Because life and reality gets in the way. And so I have lost that, too. And my point in bringing this up is that I have to grieve not just the bad that has happened to me, but the good that may never happen. This I have to grieve too. Can I live? Knowing that there is exquisite good that God may deny me?
Can I live? I am not safe. I cannot even keep my heart from breaking – even when I thought I had placed the barricades so high that no one would get through. God had different plans, apparently.
I AM NOT SAFE. But I am loved. And he promises to never stop loving me. And I can keep loving him, no matter what. I don’t have to be angry at him for all of this misery. Even though, from where I’m sitting sometimes, God himself appears to be terribly flawed. At least he came down here and experienced it for himself. He went to hell and lived to tell. That’s something. That’s a lot.
Our love for each other, and I say that boldly, is a great comfort to me. It is sometimes, and especially lately, the only thing that brings me any comfort at all. I lie in my bed at night and I weep and I think of how I love him. And I think of all the things about him that are so wonderful. I think of how he suffered while he lived here, and that helps me through my own sorrow. I think of how sure I am that I am on his mind all the time; he thinks of me much more often than I think of him. I think of the tender moments I have had with him that were very real to me, as real as anything else in my life. I think of how brave I want to be, because he has taught me everything I know about love.
He will come back. And when he does, he will teach me everything.
Can I live until then? I think so. I want to want to. He will never leave me or forsake me. At least at this exact moment, that is enough for me. But I am so tired.
I will get some sleep tonight, and tomorrow will be a new day. And he will be with me.
Faith and Sight 