“If
God is God why would he allow me to be adopted into a family that
would raise me to do terrible things?”
I was recently asked this by a former inmate of the
Barron County Jail. He was adopted when he was three years old and
according to him when he got older his adopted father forced him to
do some pretty perverse things that now in his 50s he has great shame
about. Why, he asked me, would God allow that? Why would God, he
inferred, stand by and let that happen?
As a pastor of a small rural congregation, I don't sit
around contemplating a good apologetic for God and the problem of
evil. It's not that I have not encountered evil in my nearly
twenty-eight years of pastoral ministry. I certainly have. I've
buried a young woman who died of cancer way before her time and
another who suffered from mental illness and later shot herself. My
work as a volunteer for both our local food shelf and with the
Salvation Army has brought me up close and personal to the ugliness
that poverty can create in families and individuals. My service at
the Barron County Jail as a chaplain has taught me the reality and
power of generational sin. No, I may not live in the 'hood but in
these idyllic woods in which we live sin abounds and scars and works
havoc in people's lives.
Many
years ago our neighbor's son was tragically killed in a car accident.
Raised in the Baptist church, he had not been a part of fellowship
for several years and at the time of his death he was living with his
girlfriend in another community. He wasn't drunk. It was simple
negligence on his part. He didn't look twice before he entered the
median of the highway before a truck slammed into his car killing him
instantly. It was, literally, an accident. At his funeral my
neighbor's pastor said, “It was all part of a greater plan”, that
God “allowed this to happen” and that even though we mourn we are
comforted because “he's with the Lord now because when he was at
Bible camp as a teen he had made his profession of faith.” I've
never asked his mother if those words brought her comfort but
admittedly sitting out in the congregation that morning my first
thought was, “Are you saying that God willed
for this kid to be killed by a truck?” To be fair, I'm not sure
what I would have said if I had been the one presiding at that
gathering but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be to opine that his death
by truck was part of some greater plan of God's. Maybe at times like
that it's better to be a Calvinist.
When we're born we don't start at zero. That is to say
that none of us are a 'blank slate' when we come into this world. We
are a born into a family, for better or for worse, that depending on
the health of that family we will be nurtured or we will be
corrupted. A few months back I sat in PV 1 at the jail listening to a
38-year-old guy I'll call CJ tell his story. He was a crack baby
which means he was screwed even before he was born. The womb is
supposed to be one of the safest places on earth but in his case his
own mother caused him to be an addict long before he took his first
breath. His father was no better and was long gone by the time CJ was
a toddler. His mother was incapable of raising him (later dying of an
overdose) and so he was brought up in the foster care system bounced
around from one family to another. Somewhere along the way he became
a user and then later a dealer. At the time of our conversation he
was looking at the potential of over two decades of incarceration for
his crimes.
As I listened to his story I was struck by the fact that
though we were only sitting across the table from one another a great
chasm of life experiences separated us. I was born into a nuclear
family where both my parents were committed to their faith and to one
another. I was born on a Friday which means by the following Sunday I
was in church and no doubt baptized soon after. My parents loved me,
provided for me, disciplined me when I needed it, made sure I went to
school and church regular as clockwork. We went on family vacations
and from time to time Dairy Queen on a Sunday night in the
summertime. That's what I mean when I say we don't all start at zero.
Compared to CJ, I was born at +50. Compared to me, CJ was born at
-25. I was set up to succeed in life whereas he was set up to fail.
Why me and not him? How is it that I was fortunate to be born into a
good family while CJ a bad one (and the guy mentioned at the
beginning of this post as well)?
Honestly,
I don't know. But while listening to CJ's story I was reminded
(again!) how fortunate and blessed I have been in being raised in the
family I was. I won't for a second attribute my circumstances to luck
and his to bad luck. “Sucks to be you” would be horrible
commentary on CJ's condition. But mysteries abound in the life of
faith and frankly most of the time I know better than to offer an
opinion as to why bad things happen to good people – and, for that
matter, bad. The thing theologically referred to as the Fall is
enough answer for me. God created a perfect world and his original
plan was to fill it with free-will agents who would willingly choose
him. But that plan involved risk that those same free-will agents
would choose to not
follow him. And thus we have the command:
“You can eat from any tree in the
garden, except from the Tree-of-Knowledge-of-Good-and-Evil. Don’t
eat from it. The moment you eat from that tree, you’re dead.”
(Gen 2:16-17, Msg)
Of course, we know
how that ended and thus we inherited the world we chose now full of
sin and disease and heartbreak and death. We wanted to run the show
ourselves – to be our own bosses – and the rest is history –
and how sad that history has been at times. That some people live
their whole lives relatively untouched by the world's sorrows I
attribute to God's goodness. That others seem to experience trouble
unlooked for or undeserved I'll attribute to man's propensity to lash
out at his neighbor, the work of corrupted structures like government
or just part of the reality of how “the rain falls on the just and
the unjust” (Matt 5). As someone reminded me once, “We're not
living in the Garden of Eden, you know. We're not even next door to
it.”
...there
is a distinction between the “pastoral”...problem of people
I
agree. Most of the people who come to me with their questions (when
they do come at all) aren't really looking for me to give them a good
answer when, in truth, good answers don't abound. They just want to
be heard and have their pastor acknowledge that sometimes the math in
life doesn't add up. I have learned to tread carefully in the
presence of suffering. Pat answers won't do. And frankly, I don't
usually feel like I have
to defend God. He's a big God and he can defend himself if he needs
to. Instead I try and mimic Job's posture who in the face of divine
rebuke contritely responded, “I babbled on about things
far beyond me, made small talk about wonders way over my head.”
(Job 42). So, I simply try to
listen and be a representative of the God who is Immanuel,
“God-In-It-with-Us.” It provokes me to silently pray the biblical
prayer, “How long, O Lord, how long?” while at the same time it reminds me something
that Forrest Gump once said, “Sometimes, I guess there's just not
enough rocks.”
