I saw it again this week - a well-known Christian family posting an update following a tragic family event. It was an update that started with those ever-famous words:
We still don't know why this happened.
It's a very common sentiment, especially among those who profess belief in Christ. Especially among those whose professed belief in Christ is more public than, say, yours or mine tends to be.
We don't know why this happened.
It's said as though being a Christian is supposed to protect us from bad things. It's said as though there's some great big cosmic plan unfolding that we haven't uncovered yet. It's said as though everything has some massive, big, God-sized reason for happening in our lives and if we could just figure out what that reason is, we would be able to better live into it and achieve...maximum glory? Maximum testimony?
Like we are going to be the ones, in a very Job-like fashion, to put the final nail in Satan's coffin.
I see it all the time, but I don't really understand it. I guess it's a natural human impulse, made more acute by our faith that believes that we're all wrapped up in a story bigger than ourselves, but I don't really know what good it does.
In fact, I think it can do more harm than good.
I don't say this naively. I think it's safe to say that I have lived a life with more challenges than the average person. But I've never been tempted to ask why.
I've never been tempted to believe that I uniquely don't deserve this. That's not to say that I think that I do deserve it; it's just that I recognize the nature of living in a fallen world in a broken flesh and it seems perfectly reasonable to me, then, that broken and fallen things would happen, even in my own life. There is nothing that I can look at in this world that is not a deformation of what it was intended to be.
And so, the question is never, "Why did this happen to me?" as though bad things aren't expected to happen or at least, aren't expected to happen to me because I love God so much and try so hard to be so faithful...the question is always, "What does faith require of me here?"
How do I respond to this fallen, broken thing? How do I bring God's glory to this situation? How do I honor Him in this space, in this season?
It seems like a slight difference, but it changes everything. Because when we, as a people of faith, keep asking why bad things happen to us as though loving God is supposed to make us immune to such things, we turn God into a talisman...and a bad one, at that. We create the impression for a watching world that following God isn't all it's cracked up to be, all that it promised to be, because here we are and bad things are still happening to us, which implies...maybe God isn't good. Maybe He doesn't love us like we thought He did. Maybe He doesn't care whether we love Him or not or whether we're trying to live by faith or not. Maybe none of this matters.
But if, instead, we accept that bad things happen in a fallen and broken world and shift our question just a little bit to ask what faith should look like now - without having to have a reason, without having to explain the bad things away, without having to find a justification, without having to put some grand, giant narrative story onto everything - if we ask what faith should look like now, well, then, we might just bring glory to God after all.
Which is really what we want to do. Isn't it?
