How vs Why

It seems I’ve been hearing the question, “Why?” a lot lately.  Bad things have been happening to people, and they have been asking me why those bad things have been happening to them.

And I understand that question.  I understand the tendency to ask that question.  I have asked it myself.  I still ask it myself.  Often.

Lately, though, I’ve come to understand something about this question, something that makes me in turn question it.  That something is somewhat summed up in the words of The Architect from The Matrix Reloaded:

Like Neo, we are irrevocably human, and thus irrelevant questions are going to be (or at least seem) pertinent to us, more pertinent than they actually are.  The irrelevancy of these questions is going to be far less obvious than it actually is.

And in many ways, the question, “Why?” is irrelevant.  A simple analogy will reveal this.  Say you have a knife wound in your shoulder; you have literally been stabbed in the back.  You might wonder why that happened.  Was it an accident?  Was it intentional?  Did a friend mistake you for someone else and strike you in error?  Or did a friend purposefully turn on you and try to take you down?  Pertinent questions, to be sure.  But not as pressing as the fact that you now have a knife sticking out of your back that needs to be removed, that you now have blood flow that needs to be stopped and a puncture that needs to be stitched.  The “how” in that situation (the removal of the knife, the stopping of the blood, the stitching of the puncture, the saving of your life and healing of your body) is obviously far more pertinent than the why.  Less emotionally pressing, maybe, but far more pertinent.

I believe it is the same in the life of faith.  How, that is, how we react to bad things, how we survive them, how we heal from them, how we overcome them, is far more pertinent to the life of faith than why they happened.  Perhaps no book of the Bible reveals this more than Job.  The first two chapters of Job give us a behind-the-scenes look at what was happening to that man; we know why bad things happened to Job perhaps better than we know why bad things happened to anybody else.  Yet when God finally appears to speak with Job about the matter, He does not give that why to Job.  He does not tell Job why these bad things happened to him, even though He and we know that why very well.  Instead, He just gives Job a lecture on how great He is, a lecture which is probably intended to teach Job to trust in Him.  Job (who as far as we know never discovered the why of the bad thing that happened to him) indeed learned the lesson of trust from that lecture, responding to it in this way:

I wasn’t as accepting of that lesson at my first couple readings of Job.  I felt rather cheated by than answer in fact.  I thought it was a “no-answer”.  I wanted a better answer than that.  What I’ve realized in the decades since those first couple readings is that this answer is the best answer.  It is the only answer we’re likely to understand.  It is also the only answer we’re likely to accept.

Understanding is one thing.  I know we all think we’re very smart, but the fact of the matter is that we aren’t.  We aren’t able to order the universe as God has, to maintain all the parts that have to work together for life to continue.  We don’t even know what all the parts are.  Even if we did, we wouldn’t be able to conceive of them all in a working way.  And even if we did that, we wouldn’t appreciate them all.  We see a quick example of this every time we watch a science fiction/space-faring movie.  If I understand the universe correctly, most of space is full of radiation that will kill humans quite quickly.  I’ve never seen a space-faring show cover this aspect of space-faring, though, never seen one explain how the characters are faring through and sometimes living in lethal space.  I’ve rarely seen one explain how they have earth-like gravity on their spaceships, either.  The creators of these movies and shows routine miss facts like that.  They are apparently oblivious to them, or, if they aren’t oblivious to them, they can’t figure out who to tell an engaging story around them.  If we can’t do that, which is comparatively simple, how are we going to understand the far more complex matter of why bad things happen?  Even if God told us directly, we wouldn’t get.

We also wouldn’t accept it.  Understanding is one thing.  Acceptance is quite another.  And I don’t think we would accept most whys.  I don’t think we would accept most explanations of why bad things happened, even if they came from God Himself.  Imagine if God had told Job, “Hey Job, you’re about to go through several traumatic events in order to prove that people will love me even when they aren’t blessed.  In the process, you’ll become an icon of faithfulness that will inspire millennia after millennia.”  When you put it like that (which is an accurate way to put it), you can clearly seen that goodness came out of Job’s tremendous suffering.  Great and tremendous goodness, in fact.  Would Job have seen it that way, though?  I wonder.  He might have, but he might also have said, “God, are you sure there isn’t another way?”  I know one guy who said such a thing: singer Chris Isaak.  I saw Chris Isaak on The Today Show (I think) around 2001 (again, I think).  During his time there, Katie Couric (yet again, I think) mentioned that he had suffered during his lifetime.  He said he had indeed suffered.  She then said something to the affect of, “But it made you such a great songwriter.”  To this, Isaak replied, “Yeah, but sometimes I wish I was a mediocre artist and had a swinging life.”  I can’t document that exchange (I have been trying for years, but it was the pre-YouTube era and if it exists out there I can’t find it).  Nonetheless, I heard him say it.  I understand the choice he thinks about there, and I imagine most of us would think about that choice or even make that choice ourselves.  If God said to us, “This suffering will produces this good”, we would most likely answer, “Can’t we suffer less and have less good?”

That being the case, we just aren’t able to handle the answers to the question of why, and God, knowing that, doesn’t try to give that answer to us all that often.  And now that I’ve been dealing with that question via the lives of various people for a couple weeks, I’ve come to the conclusion that we would be better off if we just didn’t ask.  I have come to the conclusion that we would be better off trusting God no matter what we experience.  I have come to the conclusion that we will do far better if we focus on the pragmatic question of how or even what (i.e., “How does God want me to respond to this?  What does God want me to do here?”) rather than the philosophical question of why.  I have come to the conclusion that the best response to this situations is that we find from Habakkuk who, when struggling with the question of why himself, eventually came to this answer:

In God We Trust

I was pulling into the USA Gas Station at the end of Oak Park the other day.  I like that gas station because the gas there is cheaper than anywhere else, so I fill up there whenever I get the chance.  As I was pulling in this day, I noticed some sort of moving truck parked on the adjacent side street.  It was a truck from a local business, not a national one.  And at the bottom, the local owners had printed the motto, “In God We Trust”.

“Amen,” I said as I completed my turn and pulled to a stop at the first open pump.

But as I stepped out of my car, I realized that my amen was more automatic than authentic.  I had said amen because I recognized the owners of that truck to be “on my team”, not because I recognized the truth of the actual statement.

To be honest, I’m not sure I’ve ever recognized the truth of the statement “In God we trust”.  That statement is more a motto, as I called it above.  Really, it is more like a slogan or even a jingle.  At least it is for me.  I’ve heard it so many times that I no longer really hear it, no longer consider what it is saying, what it is encouraging me to do, what it is establishing as right or correct or wise to do.

As I reflected upon that while pumping my gas, I realized that this statement was really saying something profound, that it was encouraging me to is something I should do, that what it is establishing as right and correct and wise and really right and correct and wise indeed.

What I realized is that saying “In God we trust” (or, to make it more individual, “in God I trust”) is more than just pledging fidelity to a team.  What I realized is that it is a confession of a way of life, a healthy way of life.  Trust is basically the same thing as belief.  It is used 36 times in the NIV, and almost every time it is translating the Greek word pisteuo, which is believe or have faith or some variation of that idea.

As I am not a translator and not incredibly skilled at Greek, I’m not sure why it is translated as trust is these passages rather than believe, which is far more common.  My guess, though, is that the passages in which it is translated trust are a little more intensive some of the others.  My guess is that the belief/faith in these passages is more than just an intellectual assent to something but a more committed reliance upon it.  I once heard it defined in this way: “faith is thinking a guy can walk across a high wire pushing a wheelbarrow; trust is getting in the wheelbarrow”.

What I am discovering at this stage in my life is that this “getting in the wheelbarrow” is not just what trust is but that it is also an essential element of living life correctly.  The fact of the matter is that I have to get into the wheelbarrow quite often whether I want to or not.  The fact of the matter is that my path involves quite a few hire wires.  The only way across these hire wires (the only healthy way, as I said before, the only way that doesn’t result in devastating anxiety) is this trust in the one who is pushing the wheelbarrow over these high wires, this “trust in God”, this commitment, this reliance, this belief that He can get me over the hire wire and will get me over the high wire.

So it is a motto.  It is a good motto, and shouldn’t stop being a motto.  It is a signifier of which team you on are, too.  But even more than those, it is a way to live.  It is again the right, correct, and wise way to live.  It is the way I am trying to live.  And I invite you to try along with me.

 

This Will Not End In Death

I have a mentor, an older man who helps me in the life of The Faith.  I have a couple mentors, actually.  One of them came to see me today.  We spent about a hour and a half talking about various aspects of the life of faith, some of which were challenging but all of which were inspiring and encouraging.  Perhaps the most inspiriting and encouraging was the way he walked me through John 11, the account of Lazarus’ resurrection.

I was familiar with that story, of course, having covered it at least once in Bible college and heard numerous messages on it in church.  But my mentor showed me things in that story I had never seen before.  The most significant of those is Jesus’ opening words in the story.

 

This sickness will not end in death, Jesus says.  He tells His disciples right from the start that Lazarus’ sickness (and, by extension, everything connected to it, including Jesus’ return to Judea) will not result in death (again by extension, death for anyone).  What then follows is what would be called “the debate” in a story or screenplay (according to Blake Snyder, the debate is what ends the first act of a story).

The disciples debate Jesus on this point, certain that a return to Judea will indeed result in Jesus’ death as well as their own.  Jesus continues to assert that it will not result in death.  He even asserts this after Lazarus has died.  Finally, Thomas agrees to go to Judea with Him (and apparently persuades the others to go also) even though he is still sure doing so will result in all their deaths (my mentor called this “pessimistic yet courageous faith”, which I said pretty much describes my faith).

Their going to Judea did not result in their deaths, though.  Instead, it resulted in their witnessing one of the greatest of Jesus’ miracles, their witnessing what Jesus called glory.  As Jesus said at the beginning, the event did not end in death.  They did not die.  They apparently were never in danger of dying.

In the same way, Jesus is asking me to do things.  He is leading me into new and sometimes scary territories.  And He is telling me that it will not result in death, no matter how much it might look or seem like it will.  He is telling me it will result in glory.  This story is The Story; the beats in this story line up with and reflect the beats of The Story.  This is happening in my life right now.  It is probably happening in yours as well.  If it isn’t, it soon will.   May we believe what Jesus is telling us.  May we understand and be convinced of the fact that death is not and never will be our fate.  May we understand that we are headed not for death but for glory.