I have been angry.
Angry that my brother was disabled at all. Angry at what it did to my childhood and kept on doing to my adult life. Angry about the responsibility placed on me long before I was old enough to hold it.
But I have never been angry at God about my brother.
Not as a child, not as a teenager, not since. I know how unusual that is. I have sat with people who were handed something like this and spent decades at war with heaven over it. I do not think they were weak or faithless. I think they were asking a question I was never required to ask.
A current in the house
Nobody sat me down and taught me this. It ran through our house like a current — in what my mother said at church, at the kitchen table, to no one in particular. Satan is the one who causes the bad things in this world. God does not do this to people.
I heard it long before I could have told you what it meant.
When I was older, I asked her about it directly.
I could not tell you what I asked, or what words she used, or how old I was. I don’t remember the conversation at all. What I know is that it happened, and that whatever she said held. I turned it over, found nothing to argue with, and have never seriously questioned it since. The answer had been in the air of that house so long that the conversation barely registered. It confirmed something I already had.
But here is what I notice now, looking back at what my mother actually did.
Two questions hiding inside one
She never told me why my brother was disabled.
There are two questions hiding inside that one, and only the smaller one has an answer.
The first is how. That I have known most of my life. Decisions were made around the time of his birth whose consequences could not be undone — a human being making choices, not a verdict from heaven.
The second is why him. Why this child, in this family, on that day. There is no answer to that one, no large answer waiting somewhere for me to find, and I have stopped looking.
That second question is the one my mother’s answer was built for. She could not tell me why him. What she could do was rule out one answer.
Not God. Whatever this was, it did not come from the One who loved him.
That is not an explanation. It is a floor — the thing standing between me and the bottomless place underneath, where either there is no answer at all, or the answer is that a loving God did this to my brother on purpose.
What she gave me never satisfied the hunger for an explanation. It was never going to. It did something better. It told me where not to look.
I did not earn this
I inherited it from a woman with her hands full who was certain about something before I was old enough to be uncertain. If your faith buckled under a diagnosis, that was not sloppy theology and it was not a failure of trust. Some of us were simply handed a settled answer early, by someone who never wavered.
So this is one thing I can say without any complication at all. I never had to doubt that God loved my brother. I never had to doubt that He loved me.
That question was answered in our house before I was old enough to ask it.
Father, thank You for the people who were certain when we could not be. And for everyone still standing in the middle of the question — be a floor under them. Amen.
Next time: why we go looking for someone to blame, and what we are really hoping to find.
(Click here to see the first in this series.)
