There was a heartbreaking story from Kansas back in the fall of 2003. During flooding there, a wall of water washed across the Kansas turnpike, overwhelming a family of six in a minivan. In an attempt to save his family, the father, Robert Rogers, kicked out a window, but was immediately sucked out into the torrent. In the end, he was the only member of his family to survive. His wife and their four children, ages one, three, five, and eight, all drowned, the three youngest still strapped into their car seats. The oldest child along with her mother, were also swept out of the car but drowned in the raging waters.
Regrettably, stories of families perishing in floods, house fires, tornadoes, hurricanes, and other disasters are not that unusual, but in this particular case, the surviving father made some remarkable faith statements to the press and those who gathered to support him following the crushing loss. By all reports, this was a solid, loving, faith-filled family. According to a neighbor who talked to Mr. Rogers, as the water rose in the car, the parents tried to keep the children calm by praying and singing hymns. She described the Rogers as "an amazing family."1 When Rogers spoke to the press, he stated his deep grief, but along with that he said: "God is God, and I am not," and "I am here by the grace of God."
I understand those remarks to be Rogers' way of saying that our lives are in God's hands, and that for people of faith, when some horrible loss like this occurs, we do not have the option of second-guessing God or saying that we no longer trust him.
Now you may or may not agree with that, and most of us facing that kind of loss would probably not be able so soon afterward to affirm our faith, but I found myself impressed by what this man said.
His words also reminded me of the story behind the writing of the hymn, "It Is Well With My Soul." The words were written by another grieving father, H. G. Spafford, in 1873, a few days after his four daughters had drowned in the collision of two ships in the Atlantic Ocean. The hymn includes these lines:
When peace like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll,
Whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well with my soul.
That's another surprising testimony of faith, under the circumstances.
Both of these fathers remind me of that biblical father who suffered great losses, including the deaths of all his children, Job. You perhaps recall the story. Job was a faithful servant of God's. He was also prosperous and had a large family. According to the biblical account, Satan came to God and asserted that Job only trusted God because things were going well for him. Satan argued that if all his goods were withdrawn and his family taken away, Job would curse God.
In response, God permitted Job's goods to be lost and all his children to die in a great windstorm. Job was devastated, and much of the book contains his friends' remarks, which urged him to acknowledge that he had sinned and deserved what happened to him. But Job protested his innocence and argued back that he did not deserve such troubles. He did not curse God, but he did want God to explain himself. In the end, when God responded, God did not explain, but instead reminded Job of the mighty actions of God in the world.
In the end of the book, Job replies to God, with humility and trust, accepting that there will be no explanation. Job repents for questioning God's ways. Job again asserts his trust, even the face of the great calamities that had befallen him.
These three bereaved fathers, one from centuries ago, one from years ago, and one from just days ago, all bring us face-to-face with that old conundrum that people of faith struggle with: Why do bad things happen to good people? Theologians sometimes depict the problem by drawing a triangle and then placing one of these statements at each corner: "God is love," "God is all-powerful," and "Evil is real." Our logic tells us that all three cannot be true. If God truly loves us and is all-powerful to prevent bad things from happening, then what seems evil to us must not really be evil, but that surely can't be right.
If evil is real, and God is all-powerful, then he must not really be loving, or else he would stop the evil.
And, if evil is real and God is truly loving, then he must not be all-powerful, and thus cannot prevent these bad things from happening. A few years ago, there was a book that got a lot of attention, called When Bad Things Happen to Good People. It was written by a rabbi named Harold Kushner, who was also a grieving father. His son had died at age fourteen from progeria, a rapid-aging disease that essentially turns the bodies of children into those of elderly people. In the book, Rabbi Kushner struggled with this whole question, and while he didn't say so in so many words, he essentially came down on the side of evil being real and God being love but perhaps not able to prevent bad things from happening.2 It is a good and helpful book nonetheless, especially to those dealing with some awful loss, and I recommend it, but understand that no one has a satisfying answer to this logic mystery.
What all of this leads us to is that what we need to go on in faith after a great personal loss is something other than a logical answer. Back in the nineteenth century, the America poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier, in a poem called "The Eternal Goodness," wrote of the impossibility of humans understanding completely the ways of God:
Who fathoms the Eternal Thought?
Who talks of scheme and plan?
The Lord is God! He needeth not
The poor device of man.
If there is no answer to the question of why bad things happen, what is there? Kushner offers us one thing: His struggle to understand led him to remember that while we often take "answer" to mean "explanation," it also has the meaning of "response."3 Thus, while we have no answer to this, we can have a response. What Job got was not an explanation; it was a response from God. We can have that as well. And we can have a response to God. Robert Rogers, H. P. Spafford, and Job all model the response of faith.
In that regard, a phrase from Psalm 71 comes to mind. In that psalm, which is both a prayer for help in a time of trouble and a statement of confidence in God, the psalmist says in verse 7, "I have been like a portent to many...." The meaning of that phrase is uncertain. Portent itself usually is a synonym for "omen" or "sign," something of prophetic or ominous significance, but it can also denote something amazing. In the context of the whole psalm, the phrase has three possible meanings.
For one, it could mean that the psalmist's life was an example of God's wrath. In that day, most people assumed a direct cause-and-effect relationship between one's righteousness and one's circumstances. Thus, if the psalmist had experienced great calamities in his life, onlookers would likely have concluded that it was because of some failure in the psalmist's relationship with God.
Given that outlook, however, it is just as likely that the phrase meant that the psalmist's life had been a sign to others of God's favor. If he were the recipient of many blessings, others would assume he was an especially righteous person. Recall that in the story of Job, his initial prosperity was viewed as a sign that God was pleased with him. But when that was withdrawn, Job's friends urged him to admit that he had sinned.
But for a third possibility, consider that The Jerusalem Bible translates the phrase as, "To many I have seemed an enigma." Given the cause-and-effect assumptions of the era, a person who had great troubles — such as losing his entire family in a flood — but who still professed strong confidence in God would be an enigma — a puzzle — to many. Actually, in the context of the psalm, this third possibility is the most likely one; from what else other than trouble would the psalmist be both praying for deliverance and expressing confidence in God's power to save him?
Such a person was not only a puzzle in that day, but is also often a puzzle yet today. Some who saw the interview on television with the newly widowed and now childless Rogers, where he said those things about his trust in God and shook their heads, thinking, "How can he say that now? I don't think I could. I doubt I could undergo such a loss and emerge with my faith intact."
I admit that I felt that way the first time I read the story behind the writing of "It Is Well With My Soul." In fact, I considered whether the man might have been in denial. My suspicion of that deepened when I read a little further and discovered that eight years later, Spafford headed off for Jerusalem under the strange notion that he was a second Messiah. Apparently some mental disturbance took hold of his mind, although we cannot know if it was in any way related to his sorrow over the loss of his children.4
But the fact is, most people of faith who undergo such terrible losses do not lose touch with their sanity, and many discover that it is in exactly such terrible circumstances of pain and loss that their reliance on God comes to mean the most.
More than a generation ago, one of Scotland's finest preachers, Arthur John Gossip, put this rather clearly into perspective when his wife died suddenly. He went to the pulpit as scheduled the following Sunday and in his sermon for the day said:
I do not understand this life of ours. But less can I comprehend how people in trouble and loss and bereavement can fling away peevishly from the Christian faith. In God's name, fling to what? Have we not lost enough without losing that too?5
So let us look at this matter of a response rather than an answer. What enables us to respond in faith when we have lost someone we love deeply or have experienced some other heart-wrenching loss?
One of those things is a conviction that God is good. Earlier, I mentioned the poem by Whittier called "The Eternal Goodness," and the goodness of God is exactly what that poetry is about. Perhaps not surprisingly, some stanzas from "The Eternal Goodness," are often read at funerals. In the poem, after acknowledging the great pain and injustice he sees in the world, Whittier says:
Yet, in the maddening maze of things,
And tossed by storm and flood,
To one fixed trust my spirit clings;
I know that God is good!
I long for household voices gone,
For vanished smiles I long,
But God hath led my dear ones on,
And He can do no wrong.
I know not what the future hath
Of marvel or surprise,
Assured alone that life and death
His mercy underlies.
And so beside the Silent Sea
I wait with muffled oar;
No harm from Him can come to me
On ocean or on shore.
I know not where His islands lift
Their fronded palms in air;
I only know I cannot drift
Beyond His love and care.
Whittier was convinced that greater than the reality of evil is the goodness and mercy of God that underlies our lives. That's not an answer; that's a response.
My heart went out to Robert Rogers of Kansas who started that week with a wife and four children and ended the week with all of them gone. I was deeply moved by his statements of faith, and, given what he had lost, I am sure that his testimony makes him a puzzle to many. I can only conclude that like Whittier, Rogers was convinced of God's goodness and was being carried by the mercy that underlies.
And why shouldn't he be? Over and over again, the Bible asserts that God is good and that his mercy is real.
1. <www.cnn.com/2003/WEATHER/09/02/cnna.broyles/index.html>.
2. See, for example, Kushner comments on pages 30 and especially on page 148, where he talks of God's "limitations." When Bad Things Happen to Good People, copyright 1981 (New York: Avon edition, 1983).
3. Ibid., p. 147.
4. Haldor Lillenas, Modern Gospel Song Stories (Kansas City: Lillenas Publishing Company, 1952), p. 85.
5. From Gossip's sermon, "When Life Tumbles In, What Then?"
