The Hustle.
I recently had dinner with a fantastic group of guys as part of our “Evolving Faith” gathering. A couple days later one of the guys asked us to pray for a close friend of his. At age 56 he was diagnosed with advanced liver cancer without warning…and given two weeks to live. Whoa, same age as me.
Go ahead, put yourself in his shoes for a moment. You’ve been given two weeks to live. Wife and two boys. What emotions are you feeling? Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance… We know the stages; we’ve just not had to engage them (yet) at that level of intensity. Or maybe you have.
During this season of Lent, we’re learning to “die before we die”—to face our small daily deaths as well as the big death approaching, without fear. To receive humiliations, powerlessness, and injustices without rage or resistance, but with love and hope and healing. To somehow, counterintuitively, accept that resurrection is only reached through death. Does that sound unrealistic? Callous? Too passive?
We just celebrated Ash Wednesday together here in the High Country, and as we entered into a 1500-year-old tradition of placing ashes on one another’s foreheads as a sign of our willingness to enter both into the death and resurrection of Christ, we spoke these words over one another: “Don’t be afraid to die.”
Don’t be afraid to die. I felt a catch in my throat as I spoke those words over my 81-year-old father and traced a dark cross on his forehead.
Two weeks was spot on. My friend’s friend died almost exactly two weeks later, and a text arrived, “Please pray for his wife. She's understandably very angry and disillusioned. This kind of death is always difficult to make sense of.” Indeed. And there’s not much to make sense of here…only a path of grief to be walked, one day at a time, until the grief has its way with us and releases its grip.
Grief either softens us…or hardens us. We are undone by it; it takes our breath away. And fundamentally, it challenges our view of who God is and the “rules of engagement.” What are the agreements we “signed” when we yielded our lives to Lordship? What were the unspoken social contracts we accepted?
Despite our rejection of the Prosperity Gospel, some of these subtle beliefs still filter into our unconscious expectations: that if we do our part (go to church, pray, trust, and generally be a good Christian) that God will do God’s part (protect us, heal us, and buffer us from at least the more severe sufferings). Do you recognize any of those elements in your belief system? We might call it the Faith Hustle… As long as I keep spinning the plates, God, you’re not going to let them fall, right?
By the way, I’m not putting any of this on the family in question. I’ve never met them, know nothing about their faith story. These reflections have to do with my own journey, my own negotiations and disappointments and recalibrations of faith…and those of some I know. I believe some of these expectations of God have been misplaced and have set us up for misunderstanding. For loss of heart and even loss of faith. Is there a way to realign this?
The poet-king David boldly asserted that he had boiled down the two most essential qualities of who God is, that God is loving and God is powerful (Ps. 62). Okay, I’m good with that. On the divine job description, those seem like the right top two. But here’s where it gets dicey: What love and power I have toward my kids, I use to protect them from pain. Of course, with my human limitations, that only goes so far…but with no human limitations, wouldn’t God’s love and power be able to protect us more thoroughly? Shouldn’t God be able to keep a 56-year-old from premature death?
Wiser minds than mine have been wrestling with the problem of pain for a long time…and the answers aren’t completely satisfying. But here are a few musings that are helping me…
If there is a God (and with all my heart I believe there is), this God must be unceasingly good and strong. Some have discarded that hope as naive, and I understand. And since these things aren’t provable in the scientific sense, we simply have to decide what kind of a world we want to live in, and I choose a world that is loved and held by a good God.
And since pain is woven deeply and extensively into the human experience, suffering and loss must not be at odds with God’s goodness and power. This doesn’t make suffering good (which would be absurd), but it does raise the possibility that suffering could be redeemed by good and for good in our lives. Which I have experienced. And I suspect you have too.
Jesus was never glib or dismissive of suffering. Jesus entered deeply into the grief and loss of those around him, not to mention his own. Compassion (the willingness to suffer-with) is perhaps the greatest evidence that the kingdom of God has drawn near.
Physical healing and miracles pervaded the life and ministry of Jesus, yet seem to be few and far between in our modern world. I don’t understand that (particularly with his cryptic words that “whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these” (Jn 14). Did Jesus have different “greater” works in mind that miracles? I don’t know. I just know that, personally, I find myself praying more that those suffering will somehow fall into the arms of a loving God and be comforted and sustained and healed internally, even if they aren’t healed externally.
I believe in abundance. I believe that God will be for us and provide for us everything we truly need, in this life and the next. And that, if we don’t have it now, then we don’t need it now. I’m not going to pretend that pain doesn’t hurt. Instead, I want to invest my life in being present to the pain of others and alleviating it to whatever extent possible.
Is it possible for us to experience the active, powerful, loving, transforming presence of the Trinity—not as a get-out-of-pain-jail-free card—but right smack in the middle of the messiest, most uncomprehending, most unexpected losses we can encounter? In the inexplicable tragedies of war in Ukraine and the isolation of Covid and the fear of climate change and alienation of politics and, yes, in the midst of the unspeakable loss of spouses and children? To grieve and to hope…. To not let our hearts get crusty with cynicism, but to allow pain to soften us?
O God, how we need your help in these delicate matters of the soul. Mend us. Strengthen us. And let us serve one another with kindness.
growing the soul
Do you need to realign your “social contract” with God? Maybe let God off the hook for not being God the way you want? What would that look like? Who can you talk to about these deep matters of heart?
serving the world
Who is suffering right now in your world, and how can you bring your authentic presence to them…without fixing anything, just being with them?
takeaway
God’s love and power don’t give us a free pass on suffering; they meet us in the middle of it.