AP (2008)
I am feeling grieved today after seeing images of mothers wailing for their children in the aftermath of a school collapse in Haiti. It brings the issue of suffering immediately to mind. How do you answer a woman who asks why this has happened? What words do you hope to give in response to such a tragedy?
Feebly, I think of the human failures that have led to this injustice; the Haitian government blames the collapse on shoddy work and sub-par construction. The blame is unequivocally attributed to the hands of humans.
Some children are pulled alive from the rubble, the bright gypsum dust coating their cocoa skin as if to symbolize the contrast between profound relief in one quarter and frantic howls in the other.
Yes, this awful tragedy is, once again, the result of human failure and possibly of human sin (greed? cutting corners for greater profit?). Yet as a mother of four watches her neighbor’s child rescued from the wreckage while she herself waits to see even one of her baby’s faces, how can we respond to how God could have let this happen? Because if he has rescued that woman’s child, why could he not rescue mine?
And at this point, all the answers I’ve thought through about suffering seem to fall short. Yes, it’s directly the fault of humans, not God. Yes, God has allowed the actions of free beings to play out, even while acting mercifully within that situation to preserve life. Yes, we are still part of a corrupt and dying world where the effects of evil and sin manifest in so many ways.
But I see the face of the weeping mother, the lives of her children torn away as if someone had reached into her chest and ripped out her very heart, and I realize that these answers mean so very little. And the only place I find hope is in Scripture itself, where the righteous sufferer Job stood before God, even at times seeming to shake his fist indignantly on account of his own blamelessness, until he finally recognized that sometimes the answer to suffering is “Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know.”
Maybe it seems trite. Naïve. Foolish.
But I don’t say it as a cop-out or because I just want to blindly be a Christian without dealing with difficult questions. I say it because we are only human and we don’t always have the answers. We don’t always understand God’s wisdom or, oftentimes, how his arm works for redemption.
I say it because I know this is the God who cares for orphans and widows in their distress, who takes care of the foreigner in a foreign land. This is the God who sets captives free, gives sight to the blind, and healing to the lame. This is the infinite God who has humbled himself and taken on human flesh, who has suffered at the hands of human beings to be treated with the greatest possible shame and to be subjected even to death. And this is the God who brings redemption precisely out of that.
So as I grieve over this loss, I grieve with the recognition that God is not pleased. Not only so, I grieve knowing that this God, whose eye is on the sparrow, has numbered the hairs of every lost child and every mother in lament, and I have the hope that God can somehow work redemption even out of this.
