People do not usually say it outright anymore. It comes wrapped now. Everything happens for a reason. God gave you this child because He knew you could handle it. He only gives you what you can bear.
The older version was blunter, and it is in the Gospel.
When Jesus and His disciples passed a man who had been blind from birth, the disciples asked the obvious question: whose fault was it — his, or his parents’? Somebody must have sinned. Jesus said neither. (John 9:2-3) Put the question of blame to Him directly, about a man with a lifelong condition, and He refused the premise.
I think I know why they asked. I think we all ask for the same reason, and it has very little to do with theology.
We cannot live inside the arithmetic
If you thought about the actual risk every time you got into a car, you would not be able to drive. If you considered, every time you walked under a tree, that trees sometimes come down, you would stop walking under them. We are not built to hold that much randomness at once. We need to believe there is some control available to us, or we could not get through an ordinary Tuesday.
So we look for where the blame goes.
Watch what happens at a funeral. Almost the first question anyone asks is what caused the death. We ask it gently, and we think we are asking out of sympathy, and sometimes we are. But listen to what we do with the answer. He smoked. She never went to the doctor. They were driving too fast. He had let himself go.
I do not think we are being cruel. I think we are checking.
Because if there is a cause, and the cause is something we do not do, then we have found the edge of the danger and we are standing outside it. This will not happen to us. Our children are safe.
The question is not really about the person who died. It is about the people still in the room, guarding themselves against their own mortality.
The answer nobody wants
Mostly, we are bystanders. Ecclesiastes says it without flinching: time and chance happen to them all. (Ecclesiastes 9:11) Sometimes a terrible thing lands on a person and there is no reason anyone will ever find. Sometimes there was a decision behind it — and even then, usually not malice. Just someone choosing wrongly, without knowing what the choice would cost.
That answer leaves everyone exposed, which is exactly why it is so rarely the one people offer a grieving family.
Two things that are not the same thing
Here is where I think we get genuinely tangled, and pulling these apart is most of what my mother gave me.
God can bring good out of anything. I believe that. I have watched Him do it, in my own family and in other people’s.
That does not mean He brought the bad thing in the first place.
Those are two entirely different claims, and we say the first while meaning the second, and we say it to people standing beside hospital beds. A God who schedules a child’s brain injury in order to teach a family patience is not the God I was raised to know, and He is not the one I have found.
What I actually believe
Satan has purposed to cause as much havoc in this world as he can. That is not a metaphor to me. And I believe there would be a great deal more of it if God were not holding back what He holds back.
I cannot prove that. It is not an argument. It is what I have come to after fifty years of living my life.
I do not understand why He steps in some times and not others. I have stopped requiring myself to understand it. I suspect He has been present in far more of this than I can see.
And not all of it is settled in me. Other loads have come, heavier than I could carry, and I have found myself having to forgive God — not because He sinned, but because I was frustrated that He had not prevented it, and I could not set that down until I said so out loud.
About my brother, I never had to do that work. About other things, I have.
Both are true. I would not trade the first for a tidier story.
Lord, keep us from explanations that comfort us at someone else’s expense. Where we cannot understand, hold us anyway. And where we are angry with You, give us the courage to say so. Amen.
Next time: the afternoon on the lawn swing, and the promise I made before I could read.
Click here to see the 1st in this series.
