These are days that can range from hard to hell on earth. These are days that fueled my selfishness and arrogance and that kept me from returning home to Daddy as the prodigal long after the party was over. Why should I go back to God? After all, He doesn't really love me. I'd suspected that God didn't love me from the time I was about 10. I didn't think He hated me or anything; I just didn't think He cared. I believed God had a strong case of apathy toward me. But in my 20's that changed.
Shortly, in the emotional time of memory where I can't tell you if it was a week or a month or what, but I can say that it was way too soon for me to handle, after a miscarriage stole the fruit of the only pregnancy my first marriage produced, some well meaning idiot tried to make me feel better, encourage me he called it, by giving me a verse. Of course he had to go and tell me that God told him to share this with me so that the pain and damage could be squared, or maybe cubed, and the root of hurt would become almost impossible to completely eradicate.
Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord,
The fruit of the womb is a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior,
So are the children of one’s youth. Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them....
- Psalm 127: 3-5a
So it became clear that God was not, after all, apathetic toward me. He hated me. For some reason He truly wanted me to suffer. Why else would He allow this? As if it wasn't bad enough that I had lost so much, now He thought it would be fine to let yet another, always with the best of intentions and meaning well of course, meddling christian make sushi of my heart. I was well aware that I didn't deserve to be blessed of God, but did He have to rub my nose in the crap that had become my life? Three miscarried little lives felt like God teasing me...I love you, and I will bless you, even though you don't deserve it because My mercies are new every morning. Wait. No. Forget that. You can't have this. I'm taking this little one before you can screw her up.
No, that's not an accurate quote of what Daddy was saying, but it is how I felt with babies failing to be birthed and this verse ever before me. This reminder that there is a man who is happy and blessed, and he is not, nor would he ever be, me.
Then of course there were times when I believed this was punishment. Not of the way I was living, there were far too many meth heads and drunks at least as bad as me with multiple rug rats for me to believe that. No, punishment for an impulsive statement of fear and pain that may have been the second worst of things my father heard from me and one of the ways I hurt him most. I didn't mean to. It wasn't about him. Like everything else at the time, it was all about me.
Several people had me up at the front of the church praying for me. I was about 15, so this would be shortly after the incident where I told God to fork Himself and walked away from faith that I wrote of yesterday (Christianity Is Not The Answer). One of the people praying said that I had been ordained of God to be a minister for Him. I looked her right in the eyes and said, "No." Then I fled the church. After the service ended and I'd gone back inside, father, who had heard the prayer and witnessed the fleeing part of my reaction, tried to talk to me about it. I don't remember exactly how my he asked what amounted to why did the idea of being a minister upset me so much? But I can't forget my response of, "I'd never do that to my children." He looked like I had hit him in the gut with a sledge hammer. I hate that I never even came close to thinking about how that would sound to him and effect him. It wasn't a calculated barb to cause my father pain. I was so selfish and self centered and wrapped up in my own mess and high that I didn't even consider him. This was how I felt at that instant, and I had no filter. So God said, "Fine, I won't make you do that to your children. Which, since you one day will minister for me that means you can't have kids."
Not an accurate quote from Daddy either. This is what happens when self pity victimizes us and pain shatters our illusions of faith. My theology had been built on the sand castle floor of words others said and on the context of my own life experiences. Since as a child I did not experience what people said you experience when you are loved and blessed of God, He must not love me. Later, as radio and television preachers in the 80's made their lists of people who were going straight to hell and who were hated of God, I found myself on those lists. Proof. And just in case I ever forgot it or believed for a minute that maybe God's love and grace really did extend to me, despite my riotous life of debauchery, there was Psalm 127. "No. I was not blessed," said pain.
Sitting in prison years later I would slowly begin the journey back to God, which would not be completed until after my release and I started down the road to recovery. It started with a small seed of hope that despite Psalm 127, despite being sent to prison for something I did but for longer than everyone involved besides the DA and the judge said I deserved, despite having destroyed my marriage and the heart of the woman I had been married to, despite being a horrible son and a terrible brother, despite every sin and failure and even having purposefully turned my back on God at 14, despite me...God really just might love me. I really might fall into the group of whosoever that made up the world that He loved enough to give His only Son for. Maybe.
I think we do ourselves and the world a disservice when we rejoice publicly and weep privately. When we speak of how wonderful our life is as proof that God loves us and speak of His goodness only when we get what we want, what makes us happy, comfortable or secure. Yesterday a preacher or a worship leader, probably more than one, said somewhere that God is good. And a congregation in unison replied, all the time. That preacher said, and all the time, and all the people finished God is good. And I can't help wonder sometimes if anyone believes the words that are coming out of their mouths. I mean really believes. BELIEVES. God is actually truly good ALL THE TIME. The God who is all powerful but does not step in to prevent the pain and protect the lives of His children the way even a mediocre human would is good? All the time?
I see it on social media. It's going around again. The simple sentence God is good. But it's a common occurrence. Someone recovers from sickness. God is good! Someone gives birth to a beautiful, healthy baby. God is good! Someone gets a job they wanted. God is good! Someone got a wonderful deal on a new home because the owner had to sell in a hurry and so took a loss. God is good! Never mind the poor fellow who just ripped himself off out of desperate need and might not be feeling so blessed at the moment. The tornado skipped over my house. God is good! Never mind it trashed an entire trailer park two miles over. You get the idea.
We say God is good too easily, too glibly, without thought or response to the people who have reason to question said goodness. We don't stop to consider if our words might be cutting someone to shreds when we only say God is good when times are good. Your baby was born smiling, with ten fingers and ten toes and slept through the night from day one? So you say God is good. Hallelujah, He is. But what about the mother who hears or reads that who just had a baby born deformed and in pain who hasn't stopped crying, it feels like, in the three months since being birthed into a world of misery and misunderstanding? And what of all the mothers and fathers who have lost children or never been blessed with them in the first place? Is God still good?
Is God still good when the tornado doesn't skip the house, you lose everything including your hound dog? When you've been out of work for a year and not only didn't get a job but haven't heard a peep back from any of the over 50 job applications put in? This sickness hasn't been healed, and this body is going to die no matter what they cut, what pills or treatment they give. Is God still good?
The answer is yes. It's not meaningless cliche. It is true. God is good. When times are tough and life is hell, God is still good. When God has the power to stop the pain and doesn't, He is still good. I don't say that because I understand it. I don't say that because I am a great theologian and have studied out all the answers. I don't say that because I have used it as a mantra until I deceived myself. I don't say that because my life has been comfortable, easy or blessed by the world's standards. I have lived in The Valley of the Shadow and made my bed in hell. I do not have the material things or success that hucksters in sheep's clothing tell the flock are signs of faith. I say these things because I have lived without God and with Him. I have served myself and sought nothing but my own pleasure, comfort and safety, and I have surrendered my life and will to His care whether I have pleasure, comfort, safety or none of the above.
I have had loss in each existence. I have been used, abused and hurt both walking with God and not. I have been broke and jobless in both. I have been sick in both. There has been trouble and fear and pain and confusion. And it has been better with God than without. It is better to go through pain with the Comforter to turn to than without Him. It is better to be afraid when you can run to Daddy than it is to be afraid alone. It is better to face trouble with His help than without it. It is better to understand that I don't understand God, that my finite brain can not wrap itself around the total truth and intricacies of an infinite God, but to have something within me say that it doesn't matter what my feelings and thoughts may be and senses may tell me (because not everything I think and feel is real), God is real, He does love me, He does tell the truth and keep His word, and He is indeed good.
C.S. Lewis, a smarter man and much better apologeticist than I said:
Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself
The human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it. Now error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are the less their victim suspects their existence; they are masked evil. Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt.
He said more and better in his book The Problem Of Pain, which is quite good, but these are the things that first came to mind when I thought of some of what he wrote regarding suffering and God. It's not like I can quote the whole book here. But on his death bed he also said:
Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be—or so it feels—welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?
If you want to know how Lewis resolved this question that came as he lay dying, I highly recommend reading A Grief Observed, but I can't help but remember that even Jesus, the Perfect One, the Only Begotten cried out from the pain of the cross asking why Daddy had deserted Him. We have our moments because we live in a fallen world under the power of sin, destruction and death that there will be loss, pain and trouble. Daddy had the power to fix it by taking it all away instantly or to fix it by sending Jesus to make it possible for us to have relationship with Him, by giving us the death and resurrection of Christ to pay our debts and give us the power to both overcome and endure that we don't have on our own. He made it possible to have a life worth living despite the pain instead of without pain. He gave us a place to run when afraid instead of fixing things so that we would never experience fear. He gave us a foundational truth to rely and build on that is rock and not shifting sand, the truth of who He is and His love, instead of making us smart enough to never doubt or be confused.
And I believe that on the other side of the eternal, when we get to the place where we can see and understand and know far more than we can now with our teensy, tiny little brains running their thoughts through the filters of selfishness, contextual experience, pain and fear, we will see and understand how this plan, the plan of the cross to beat evil, even though it included creating humans who God knew would throw away paradise and pass on suffering to their billions of children, is actually not only the best plan, but the only plan that could have succeeded. We will finally understand, I mean really and truly understand and get it in the depths of who we are, that God is indeed good, despite all perceived evil and suffering that ever was, ever is and ever shall be. Amen.
Until that time though, until we get it to the point where no manifestation of hell on earth can shake it and as long as we need grace to hold on to that truth, I would encourage you, Dear Reader, to consider that despite the world appearing flat while standing on it, it is actually round. And despite what it may appear from what we can deduce about pain, suffering, evil and goodness and God from the position of our current existence, God is good. And if you agree with me on that, I would encourage you, as I encourage myself, to be as quick, if not more quick, to declare the goodness of God when life falls apart as when it seems good. Not in a this is what I'm supposed to say, so God is good sigh, sort of way and not in a if I don't say He's good even in trouble He might be even meaner to me kind of way, but rather in a thankful way that says I am grateful that I am loved by a good God and that this trouble and pain is temporal but the joy to come will never end. Yes, it will help you and I to do that. But that's not why. Let us do this because it's not about me, and it's not about you, but it's about that person in pain, filled with doubt and overcome with fear, who can't see the goodness of God through their tears. They need to see the God is good as more than cliche and being more than something we say when life rocks in our favor, even if at someone else's expense. It is the truth on which our hope is built, even when our circumstances suck.
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