Faith After Nashville
My wife has an incurable form of stage four lung cancer. Every day for the past six years she takes a pill that keeps the tumors at bay. The pill was supposed to quit working four years ago. With metronomic regularity, her lungs are scanned every three months and by God’s grace, the tumors have not grown. I am regularly asked by genuinely curious non-religious friends, “how can you believe in a God that would allow this to happen to your wife?”
The church we attend is a PCA church, the same denomination as the Nashville school that saw three students and three faculty members senselessly murdered yesterday. I see the same question asked, “how can they believe in a God that would allow this to happen?” Here’s why:
"How can you believe in a God when... (fill in the blank for any negative thing that happens to a person)? I think that is the common question for many... as if God is supposed to eliminate all of life's struggles.
I have cancer. I am going in for a procedure that might extend my life expectancy or it may kill me. My mother died young of brain cancer. She had two cerebral mannerisms before that. Her high school sweetheart was from a wealthier family and he left her in her small town to attend a prestigious school. She got pregnant with me and married my father who was unstable and could not hold down a job and they divorced.... but not until she gave birth to my two brothers.
So here is my mother with her broken heart, having to endure childbirth three times, with only a high school education has to raise three boys by herself with no financial help, then has two brain surgeries 20 yeas apart for aneurysms, and then died young from brain cancer. And even when dying she wanted to know how everyone else was doing.
I have that benchmark to consider whenever I think that life is not fair.
My mothers's grandmother had eight children. Seven of them died from diseases. My grandmother was her only surviving child. I have that to consider whenever I think that life is not fair.
The clear point is that life is NOT fair. Better to enjoy the years we have in this existence walking with God.
There's no denying that over the past 25 years, the country has gotten more and more secular. But having the vast majority of citizens being church-going believers is not any kind of "insurance policy" against bad things happening. With the Right vs. the Left in America, we have a divide that keeps on getting worse every day.
In 1860, an Alabama tidewater cotton planter and a cod-eating New Hampshire Yankee had more in common with each other than we do with our own countrymen today. They prayed to the same God, believed in the same rule of law, and shared the same heritage. The only thing they disagreed about was slavery. Now that's a pretty big thing, but at least they considered each other to be God-fearing countrymen.
And even so, it led to the worst war that this continent has ever seen... brother on brother...