I have wrestled intensely with questions during the last year. Simple questions, that avoid being answered. I assume if you have ever experienced something that shook your faith at its core, you also struggled with these questions: “Why?” “Where was/is God?” “Is there any meaning to this?”
Losing Mom is to my faith like a volcano was to Mount St. Helens—totally re-shaping.
I’d like to share an excerpt from Joni Eareckson Tada’s book, When God Weeps, that has something significant to say on this:
Some would think Glenda’s (a young lady who had a drunken mother and a father who molested her as a girl) offense should be aimed against God rather than her parents. Stripped? Molested? Cursed? A child doesn’t have the strength to push away a lewd man ruled by urges. But God does. A little girl cannot outrun a drunken parent swinging a belt. A child cannot hold up a shield big or thick enough to ward off words that cut deep into her psyche. Where was God? Why not take offense at him?
What answers could possibly atone for such horrific treatment? “It would be better for (a man) to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around his neck than for him to cause one of these little ones to sin,” says God himself (Luke 17:2). Fine: wicked men will one day face the anger of a righteous Judge, but what about now?
We want answers now. But even if we know why, will it satisfy? We might ask, “Where was God? Was it his fault?” and be assured that although he is sovereign, it was not his fault. Or “Was it an assault from the Enemy?” and find that, yes, it possibly was. Or we may press further, “Is it the consequence of living in a fallen, wicked world, and not the direct personal assault of either the Devil or God?” and learn that, more than likely, it is. Back to square one: do such answers satisfy? Probably not.
Glenda, with God’s help, found the only answer that satisfied—an answer that reached into the heart where it hurt. Her anger helped show her need. Her anger helped move her in the right direction. She realized her seething hatred was just as heinous, just as nauseating as the sins committed against her. She was no better than her parents. As surely as her father thrust himself on her, she had in her imagination, thrust a knife, with hot fury, into his chest. Glenda could have easily been the one flinging curses and spitting hatred, torturing and nailing God to his cross. In fact, in acknowledging her sin, she was. The memory of spit on her seven-year-old face must have paled in comparison to the spit on her Savior. Glenda discovered, as few believers do, the depth of God’s love in that “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).
“In order to suffer without dwelling on our own affliction,” Thomas Merton once contemplated, “we must think about a greater affliction, and turn to Christ on the cross. In order to suffer without hate, we must drive out bitterness from our heart by loving Jesus. In order to suffer without hope of compensation, we should find all our peace in the conviction of our union with Jesus. These things are not a matter of ascetic technique but of simple faith.”
God suffering on a cross. There is no answer to the question “Why?” apart from Jesus. That God is part of the problem of suffering may not complicate matters after all. How, or to what extent, he created the problem, is not the question.
He is the answer and we need him.[1]
[1] Zondervan™ When God Weeps Copyright © 1997 by Joni Eareckson Tada and Steve Estes
