Reclaiming Hope & Faith During Difficult Times
SO SHALL THIS NIGHT END IN JOYOUS DAYOne of the toughest questions in all of the world has to be, how can life contain so much pain, suffering and challenge and still be a gift from a loving God? It’s a hard one. It’s very difficult to understand why pain and suffering are so much a part of life.
As remarkable and wonderful as life can be, there is no escaping the fact that tragedy and heartache are very much a part of it. Human suffering and misery is all around us. Everyday the news is full of stories of tragedies and challenges. We are often confronted with disturbing images of suffering and strife. Here lately, with the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, we are powerfully reminded of the unavoidable certainty of tragedy.
And sadly, although our thoughts have focused lately on these quakes and the unimaginable challenges facing those affected, Haiti and Chile aren’t the only places where people are confronting overwhelming difficulty.
The images from these quakes have been very disturbing. The attention the news media has given to this catastrophe has reminded us of the horrors so many of us face.
The images show the face of unspeakable tragedy, real human suffering. Think of it, lying in pain on the street with broken limbs, no one to help, no one to give you medication or water or food or move you or help you with toileting; lying in pain, infection setting in, crying out and no one to bring relief; dying a long painful death.
I broke my leg years ago and the enormous pain and helplessness and utter horror of that moment still causes me to shutter when I recall it. I’ve hardly been able to watch the television images of so many broken bodies lying helpless on the street.
Along with these images of suffering we have seen the best and the worse of human nature played out in response to these earthquakes. There has been an outpouring of generosity and help from millions of people around the world along with a small measure of grandstanding by some politicians and certain members of the news media. And many of the Haitian and Chilean people have displayed a remarkable resilience of spirit.
Along with our responses of sympathy and help we all strain to make sense of catastrophes like these earthquakes and other horrors like the genocide that still goes on. Wonderful, godly, innocent people have had their lives snuffed out or turned upside down. The Archbishop, leaders of humanitarian organizations and others who were in Haiti to bring help to this poor country were killed even as they were about the business of spreading love and mercy. A man I knew by reputation, the head of a major charitable organization that has brought hope and opportunity to many Haitian children, was in Haiti and was killed.
Quickly the simple-minded explanations began to fly about when catastrophes like these happen. Pat Robertson jumped onto the airwaves after the Haiti quake and declared God was punishing Haitians for a so-called pact they made with the devil years ago. Others said Adam’s and Eve’s original sin in the Garden of Eden caused evil and tragedy to enter the previously unspoiled human experience and these tragedies were a manifestation of original sin. Others have also suggested that tragedy stems from the failings of mankind, both past and present, sins of the fathers visited on their children.
Then there is the “God would rather you not” theory.
God would rather you not build a city where you built New Orleans.
God would rather you not engage in slave trade and transport innocent people to an island situated over a seismic fault and build a permanent city there.
God would rather you not build towns and cities near volcanoes and faults.
God would rather you not pollute your rivers and streams with toxic substances that will wreck your health.
God would rather you not smoke; drive recklessly; drink and drive.
God would rather you allow room for nature to do her thing, to shift earth plates, to blow strong winds, etc.
This theory says we bring tragedy on ourselves when we fail to pay attention and fail to defer to nature’s desires.
Some say, and I would agree, there are situations where tragedy is a prelude to good things. The personal sacrifices of civil rights workers, for example, including those who lost their lives in dedication to this cause, led to much needed changes and a bettering of conditions. Many other wrongs have been righted by the personal sacrifices, even the giving of one’s life, that brave and visionary men and women have made. But even here you have to ask, why is such a high price exacted for the advancement of the kind of change that promotes goodness and decency?
The answer is we simply don’t know and we simply do not have the ability to know why life includes pain, suffering and catastrophe. There simply is no understanding all of the heart wrenching human suffering that goes on so much of the time and which inevitably touches all of our lives.
The moral pundits and self-pronounced wise ones who offer up all kinds of explanations have absolutely nothing to offer any of us when it comes to understanding the meaning of tragedy and suffering. No one, least of all the purveyors of simplistic explanations of the unexplainable, has any idea why such things are included in something like life, something that can be so full of joy and meaning.
A great part of the mystery of the life gift is the certainty of challenge and suffering. From all appearance it is simply built into the fabric of the gift. And while it mystifies me why good and evil, joy and heartache can be packaged in the same bundle, I reject the simplistic explanations of the simple minded and find many of their explanations nothing less than totally offensive.
I remember years ago while in seminary being among the expectant crowd who gathered at Cresent Hill Baptist Church to hear what John Claypool, an accomplished cleric and man of God, had to say upon returning to the pulpit following the death of his six year old daughter. I remember him looking out on that large packed sanctuary and saying, “God has a lot of explaining to do to me.”
This great spiritual leader was humbled and mystified in the face of such an unspeakable, immeasurable loss. And he stated what I believe is the only response we can legitimately have to such catastrophe, a response I have expressed in the aftermath of my unimaginable and dreaded losses. And that is I do not know why this happen. I simply don’t understand it. It seems so out of place, so alien to a gift as wonderful as life.
Such horror is a part of the unfathomable mystery that you and I are caught up in. And like the Haitians and Chileans who embody such a powerful spirit to move on, to continue their life journeys, you and I are left without answers, mystified by the mystery, with a decision to be made at all times but especially when tragedy strikes us and that is whether we will continue to accept the gift of life; whether we can still affirm that it is O.K., maybe even good, to find ourselves caught up in this vast mystery that both brings us joy as well as heartache.
When loss, suffering and catastrophe strike our lives and rock our world we are always confronted with this decision. Will we give up; decide that because the mystery is so unfathomable, so difficult to understand that we quit? Will we decline any further participation in the process of living? Or will we humble our spirits and somehow continue to embrace not only what we can’t understand but what also has brought us such great pain and suffering?
That’s the way it feels to me when I come up against the tragic; that what I am left with is the choice whether I will eventually pick myself up from the destruction and loss that has visited my life and journey on in the kind of blind faith that describes what one does when you accept what you cannot understand. To me that is what faith is all about. In spite of all that has pained my life, in spite of it all, I still consider life; I still consider being caught up in this mystery a good thing. I still continue to accept a gift that I am offered that includes things I simply can never come to understand. Faith to me is the affirmation, not just on the good days when all is easy and well, but also on the tough days, the days when heavy weather sets in, that it is still a good thing that I am caught up in this mystery we call life. That in spite of my complete lack of understanding of why pain and suffering has to be a part of this life package, that I still accept life and thank its Giver for it.
In the tragedies that have visited me, I had times of wanting life to be over, feeling I had had enough of this gift, wishing it to be over or better yet that it had never been. But eventually, soon enough, I found in every tragedy I have faced a road out my devastation, a road full of something new and good to do, a new path worth traveling down. I hope I always will find such paths out of my trials until and including the day I face the trial which takes this life from me.
Nobody knows, nobody knows, they may tell you they know, but nobody knows, nobody can demystify the mystery. And while we all have our intuition about it, mine is that this life you and I have isn’t a one and done kind of thing. I think there is something in us that not only is able to endure the storms of life, but also endures even beyond the challenge that ushers in our own deaths. And what endures after the storms that blow strong in our lives and rob us of what we treasure so much is an innate powerful spirit that opens to us the possibility to not only live on but to live on with an expanded sense of who we are and what we can become.
The storms that inevitably visit all of our lives demolish our safe harbors and leave us with the decision as to whether we will shrink in resignation from life or march more boldly into what not only we do not understand but what has hurt us so powerfully. We make such a seemingly illogical kind of choice because of a blind faith that in spite of all we have been through, life remains a good and valuable gift, one that still holds lots of opportunity to grow our spirits and capture more and more of the rich rewards of peace, meaning, purpose and joy.
It’s a conclusion that while the storms of life assail our spirits, they also offer our hearts the rich rewards that can belong to those who are willing to get back up and accept the opportunity to move on in blind faith and claim more of the opportunity to build anew something that adds to what was, something also good and worthy, something that makes life an even greater treasure. And thus we can take our lives down new paths, ones that make it well worth continuing the journey.
Recently someone sent me some pictures taken right after the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The devastation was total. Alongside these pictures were more current pictures; ones taken 65 years after the bombs decimated these two cities.
The current photos displayed two of the most vibrant, beautiful cities on the face of the earth. Where 65 years ago there stood nothing, today there stands two gleaming cities, monuments to what mankind can achieve in the wonderful fields of architecture and urban design; and a reflection of the kind of good that can rise up out of total devastation.
It appears to me that those among us who find life the good gift it is meant to be, are somehow able to appropriate good and meaning from the trials we encounter. We are not done in by the crises that seen to destroy us. Somehow there is a spark that remains and after giving total attention and all of our energy to mourning our loss, that spark, that even we can’t see in the heat of our crisis, enables us to get hold of new possibilities and fuel a continuation of our life journeys. Mary Bilge, the singer songwriter recently release an album entitled “Stronger with Each Tear.” Such is the possibility for us all.
Alfred Adler tells the story of two men meeting in the train station in Vienna. As the story goes a man, bearing the appearance of success, well dressed, in apparent good health and mood, came upon a beggar, disheveled and done in. The well-dressed man approached the beggar and said to him, “I don’t usually give to beggars. However you are such an image of total despair. You intrigue me. If you will tell me just how it came to be that you would let yourself come to be so desperate I will buy you a meal.”
And supposedly the desperate man said to the successful man, “You see, I simply had no chance. Life has been stacked against me. From the beginning nothing has gone right for me. I never had a chance. I was a twin and my brother and I were left orphans by the Nazi invasion of Austria. We were brought up in an orphanage until we were adopted by different families and separated from one another. I lost my parents. I lost my brother. You see I never had a chance. Life just kept knocking me down. And so I gave up. I gave up. I could see there would never be anything good for me. There would never be an opportunity for me to have a good life.”
The well dressed one is said to have responded, “That’s interesting. I too am a twin. My brother and I also lost our parents during the Nazi invasion of Austria. I also was taken along with my brother to an orphanage. And I was also separated from my brother. Like you, I had a lot of hardship and loss. But somehow, every time life events took what I valued from me, somehow in time I was able to seize upon the opportunity that always seemed to be present to get back up and start over. And every time I suffered great loss, I found a path out of my despair that brought me new and wonderful life experiences. ”
And yes, you guessed it, as the two talked on they discovered they were the brothers they each spoke of.
Horatio Spafford was a successful businessman who lived in the nineteenth century. Tragically, his wife and two of his daughters were killed when a trans-Atlantic ocean liner sank off the coast of Greenland. Some months following this horrendous loss Mr. Spafford put pen to paper and wrote the words that became a powerful hymn,
“When peace like a river attendeth my way;
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot thou has taught me to say;
It is well, it is well with my soul.”
In one of the many news reports on the earthquake in Haiti, one of the newspersons asked a Haitian man why his faith was so strong. And he said, “When you have so little there really is nothing else to turn to.”
Well my friends, whether we realize it or not that is precisely the condition all of us are in. When it comes right down to it, I don’t care what you have, all of us, in the face of the incomprehensible vastness of the mystery we are caught up in, have so little that faith is truly all we have to turn to. And the good news is that such a faith, faith in the One who stands behind and within it all, is well-founded and it can be counted on to continue to bring us the kind of life whereby our spirits keep on growing in meaning and fullness, strangely nourished even by the storms that take so much from us.
And remember, the tapestry of creation remains unfinished, for us all. We and all that defines us, the strong emotions, our tragedies, our joys, our pain, our acts of love and our acts of hate, our forgiveness, our vengeance are all a part of the tapestry of who we are and who we are becoming. And even the life robbing challenge that all of us are sure to face one day can go on growing us in fullness of the wonderful spirit God makes possible for us to claim. And so like the Haitians and Chileans of faith, I join my voice with theirs and say I thank God for life and I will go on in my journey along life’s path confident that all of it is good, even what hurts and can’t be understood.
Shortly after my wife died someone sent me a note with a quote. I’m not sure who said it but it has meant a lot to me. It reads, “Through waves and clouds and storms, God gently clears the way; wait thou God’s time; so shall this night end in joyous day.” May it be true for you and for me and for all who suffer.
