As many of you SoulPancakers know, my wife and I visited Haiti to work with some charities there, PlantingPeace.org and the Mona Foundation. We spent eight days touring Port-Au-Prince and the countryside, visiting schools and orphanages, and observing de-worming projects. And then came this. On its own, without any natural calamities, Haiti is a beautiful disaster. Ramshackled, polluted, deforested, dysfunctional, broken. Zero infrastructure. To say that it is a poor country is an understatement that can only be understood by seeing it.
I urge you all to click the link above, the response by Rainn Wilson to the tragic events in Haiti is very powerful. The question at hand is...
Help me understand: How do YOU rectify God, suffering, and prayer?
This is one of those questions that, as a Christian and a youth leader I get asked alot. Why does God "allow" bad things to happen. I could never think of an answer that sounded good, the only things I could come up with are always harsh. For example, some beliefs are as follows. 1) We are sinners, we lived in a perfect world and now because of our sin and us turning our backs to God saying "we can do better" we've ruined this perfect world and all bad things are products of our sin. or 2)Satan is just as influential if not more than God and all evil works on earth are a product of him and the people who don't embrace God. This is a very touchy subject, and real difficult to answer, because, well, we don't know. Simple as that. To answer the question "how could God do this" we'd have to a) think like God and b) understand God's though process, neither of which we are capable of doing as human beings. We can't put God in a box like we try to do with everything else. If we could then we'd be on par with him, making us god's as well. We were created to be in a loving relationship with him and if we were on even ground there would be no reason to have a relationship with him, this is free will. We are supposed to question God, we are supposed to put our problems on his shoulders. God is bigger than anything we could ever imagine, how could we possibly ask him "God what are you doing", who are we to question the creator of, everything? Sure, our emotions have us take things out on him, especially this tragic disaster in Haiti. But know that he has a greater plan for all us that we can't fathom.
Now how to deal with this? Say we're at a point where we're over being angry at him for events like this, but how do we really do that? Some answer's i've heard are, after/during 9/11 God was with the firefighters and the brave people helping. God was with the pilot who landed the plane in the Hudson River. Same we could ask where is he here? 50,000 people have died. Where was he when the plane crashed outside of Buffalo? In this we are still trying to understand God on our level and we can't. All we can do is try to come to a terms of peace within ourselves to deal with the pain and frustration. Like I said before, he wants to bear our weight. That's where prayer comes in, in talking to him, pouring out our soul to him we can get all of this off our chest. The main point of this is how do we deal with the situation. I've already answered "why could God do this?" theres no answer to that. Now we need to focus on how we deal. That could be different for anyone depending on who you are. Prayer is a big help, it calms us. While in prayer you can feel, you know that God is listening.
Last week I lost a friend to brain cancer. How do we rectify suffering? Her name was Jessica Webber, she was strong the whole time, through all her suffering. That's how you do it. You need to know you can beat whatever is in your way. Sure she lost her fight, but she never once gave up, that right there is one of the strongest people I know. There's no other way around that. I want funeral's to be more about the celebration of the person's life, not the mourning of their death. That's how I rectify suffering. I celebrate all the good. I feel like it's easier to focus on the negative rather than the positive. It's easier, because while doing it we can blame someone, focusing on the positive has us being joyful in a time of pain, and that's real hard. When Jesus rose from the dead, or whenever someone was sad, he would ask "why are you sad?" or "why are you crying?". He knew, that the end result of all of this on earth is way more important than one moment like this, so don't spend your time mourning. I know it's very difficult. Im not saying that I can do this all the time too. When I look at the front page of the newspaper and I see the headline 50,000 dead I feel it. I ask, I get angry. Then I remember the promise God made to the man who was crucified next time him, when we asked for forgiveness Jesus told him "Today you will be with me in paradise" that's where it's at, right there. I can't really focus on much else.
First off I'd like to say that this is incredibly well written and thought out. During my philosophy class last semester we spent a lot of time examining the nature of human suffering. I find that in times of immense suffering people who would never turn to God for an explanation at any other time turn to ask the question "Why me?". They begin to question whether or not God loves the human race and if he really always has our best interest in mind. My take on this issue is that God does not cause these horrible events but instead permits them because suffering is an essential part of the human experience. In giving us free will and power over the workings of the world God has also given us the responsibility to cope with this suffering. Although he is always there as a source of strength for us to turn to, we are the only ones able to directly solve our problems and cope with the challenges we are faced with daily. We can not expect God to give us complete freedom and still coddle us through tough times. Disasters can be a humbling experience because they expose us to something that we have no control over and that threatens our sense that we are invincible, but I feel their ultimate purpose is to bring us back to God. God walks along side us in all times of our life, sometimes he is even there to carry us, but when we begin to hit our stride we often leave him behind and forget where we came from. Disasters force us to slow down and remember that we are not all powerful and we still rely on God. In a nutshell, God's love does not stop, but instead we turn away from it. We can not expect God to both coddle us and give us freedom and dominion over the world simultaneously.
Also at times like this it helps to remember that there is always a silver lining to every cloud we encounter. This earthquake, however tragic, has brought a lot of much needed attention to a part of the world we tend to overlook, and it has made us all aware of just how fragile human life really is, and our responsibility to work together in order to ensure that we all prosper and that nobody is left behind.
(I apologize for the non-capitalization of personal pronouns referring to God, and the fact that I used non-gender neutral pronouns. God is who we believe Him to be.)
Posted by: Tom Reed | 01/19/2010 at 11:35 PM