post 231: hard(er) questions

At church tonight, someone said we need to ask hard questions about God, and about life. Usually this implies that someone will ask why we don't trust God more, or that maybe God can do anything, and that "expanding our view of God" is about learning to trust that God does "outrageous" sorts of things on a regular basis. And maybe this is true, and maybe this is a good thing to learn about God.

But conversely, I think it's important to ask the opposite question about God, and it's something that's always bothered me because I don't hear it often asked. Tonight, someone mentioned a person they knew who'd been diagnosed with cancer. He and several other of the persons friends began praying, and roughly a week later the person was healed. A miracle, and supposedly we should all trust God because of this.

So here's my question, the one that bugs me: even if God healed this guy, why does that mean I should trust him? There are tons of people with cancer. I can't imagine that most, maybe even just many, of them, when faced with the true reality of their imminent death, don't cry out to God, whether they call him "God" or not, and beg to be healed miraculously. When we really believe we've got nothing to lose, we'll try anything. And long before that, most people have some shred of faith buried in their past, and it's enough to conquer their pride and cause them to pray for healing.

And many of these people - most, if we believe that terminal illnesses really are "terminal" - still die.

So the question is, even if God does heal people sometimes, why should I trust him? It's quite clear and apparent that he doesn't heal people all of the time - putting my trust in him will not guarantee healing. It seems like I could take this same sign to prove that God is not necessarily kind, but whimsical and fickle - not trustworthy at all, but the sort of being who dispenses blessings at an order I can't trust or rely on.

I know this question is nothing new - that this "problem of pain" has been debated and explained and struggled with a million times over the years, maybe more, with many different answers, some satisfactory, some not, but it's not the sort of thing I hear good answers to often, or the sort of thing I hear talked about much in church. And I think that's dishonest. We as Christians are all about praising God for the blessings and crediting him with the good things that happen to us, but when things go wrong, it must be our fault. With so many things going wrong all of the time, it seems like this should be a big deal, and something that we talk about more than just every once in a while.

I think we do this because we desperately WANT to rely on God. We WANT to think of him as a fixed point; unchanging, reliable, trust-worthy. Some people, including me, want to run around thinking about life as a secure fixed place with an orderly God on top who dispenses good things to the "spiritual" people who help others, and lets the rest of us mess ourselves up. It's nice - it fits, clicks, makes sense, seems to be the way things should be to us.

But that's not the way things really are; at least not in the way I've seen and experienced them. Maybe you live in a world where God will catch you if you jump off of a cliff. I don't. God will let me fall. He'll probably let me wreck my car, cut off my fingers using a saw, die of cancer, whatever. And it has absolutely nothing to do with how spiritual I am, or how much I pray. God is, along with everything else, not the sort of being who acts in ways I can ever predict. To begin a sentence with "God will" is usually to open the door for error - he very well might not.

Now I'm not saying that this makes God bad, or that his unpredictability implies that he doesn't love us. I'm just saying the opposite isn't true either - a few miracles don't prove that God is the sort of being we should put our trust in, and to represent it this way is disingenuous. I think it's really important to struggle and wrestle with the topic of God's lack of response - God's silence, refusal to answer our prayers, often "in the way we expect", but sometimes at all.

I don't have a good answer. I think one of the reasons God leaves it this way is to force us to struggle over it - to make us uncomfortable. Because it's through that sort of frustration that he often chooses to work, though sometimes maybe he'd rather speak in obvious blazing visions of glory. I think he does it to me to be elusive, to prove that I can't keep him in any of the nice neat categories or systems I want to build for him. In ways I don't have time or space to go into here, he reveals himself as good, ultimately and undeniably, then refuses to be tested on that point, and refuses to agree to constrain his behavior to seem good on my terms. He makes it quite obvious that he will act in ways or allow things to occur that seem quite evil, and that there's nothing I can do about this. I must simply trust in the goodness to the extent that I've seen it and love him, come what may, or reject his faith and stay safely within the bounds of things and people whose actions I can categorize and anticipate.

I know that sounds a little stupid. "Just trust" is not a good answer. I completely agree. That's why it's a hard question.

So, that's the hard question I thought of in response to the question posed tonight. I think it's important, and it's certainly been the focus of what I've spent my time thinking about God for the past 5 years or so. What do you think?