Trust God, or be mired in misery

By John Pearring

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/061221.cfm
2 Corinthians 5:14-21
Luke 2:41-51

God allows bad things to happen to us. Is that the kind of God we want? 

"He ought to stop all this!"

Therein lies the problem. Does our judgment of what God should allow make any sense? Do we, the creatures, get to design the creator? 

We have a working relationship with God. One that is quite personal. Our growing relationship means we make constant assessments about God and his behavior. Unfortunately, we often fabricate immature patterns for God's behavior based upon wishful thinking. Our expectations of God influences our behavior and our thinking. Of course they do. They "completely" control our thoughts and actions about God. We will be dead wrong about what we expect him to do. It's inevitable when we create expectations. We have to remain open to the impossibility of God, things that we didn't know he will do.

We’re ecstatic when God's miracles heal us, his graces nurture us, and his answers to prayer resolve our loved one’s ills. Believers experience this pattern of behavior from God every day. We need to stay on track, though, and not operate from improper expectations.

For instance, the nasty realities of violence, death, and destruction appear to conflict with a loving God. At first, anyway. Unless we look closer at those things we like about God, we won't understand God's wide berth of capabilities. A healing God means he has allowed pain and injury to take place. Otherwise, there'd be nothing to heal. A nurturing God means he guides us through a life of constant temptations and failures. Those bad things exist and so God is nurturing in their midst. Answered prayers means we expect that God is ultimately in charge of a world where prayers are necessary. We pray as we cooperate with his plan, or we are devastated because he has "failed" our plea. Pleading is the crisis step of prayer. When we get stuck in panicked pleas we forget to trust the loving God we believe in. Our expectations of a specific behavior from God will likely fail us.

At every turn no matter how mature we are about awful junk in our way and terrible stuff going on (all at exactly the wrong moments) God's allowances rattle our souls. It's part of our shared relationship to God. We're not the only ones upset. God isn't a blank, robotic, non-personal entity with no emotional characteristics. So, with every pain we experience God is also upset. With every misery we inflict, God is hurt.

Our next door neighbor, someone we’ve known for more than 30 years, passed away last week. She had miraculously recovered from cancer three years ago, and then two months back it returned with a vengeance. Her death involved excruciating pain and left her husband devastated. He was aware of God’s complex tasks and methods of intervention. She got ill, and her healing for three years was an answer to prayer. He knew without a doubt that God knows everything from the merely annoying to the ghastly horrifying. The wonderful corrections and adjustments we see from God take place in that ugly space of pain, and lots of that went on as they battled through cancer.

So, using this example of terrible misery, we must face that God isn’t caught off guard. He's present during all of it. God as a doofus is a lousy calculation for why bad things happen. God  isn’t tricked by evil, like some goody two shoes sap who’s innocence throws him into confusion. Most assuredly, God is also not short of resources to address the material needs of the world. 

So, we’re confined to the truth. Every death, every theft, and every other deceit is well within God's purview. He snuffs out some awful consequences. Others, God lets happen. God is no less tortured by misery than we are. We might go numb from constant pain, out of sheer resignation. God does not.

The night before our neighbor died the last of her relatives just barely made it back to Colorado to see her. Her children, grandchildren, and extended family all managed to arrive, hold her, and send her off. Her husband was so grateful for that, telling me through tears that it was a consolation that God orchestrated. Everyone's tears and shock, though, were a further trial as part of her death. It was very strange to hear him express his gratefulness while reliving the memory of each tearful member of the family saying their goodbyes.

An added misery, she suffered increasing pain as she held back on morphine so she could be present to her family. The complication of pain in death—all while trusting that God continues to follow through on his healing, nurturing, and answering prayers—boggles the mind.

I remember when my dad died. My brother got stuck at the LA airport and he didn’t make it before our father died. God holds back at one time and not another. So, something else is always going on in God’s plan. It must be so. God isn’t a cruel manipulator of time and events. Everything he does is about love. Isn’t it?

A vital clue to the sure presence of God’s love—while he grants evil’s activity—peeks through 2 Corinthians from Saturday’s first reading.

“God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ,
not counting their trespasses against them
and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.”
(2 Corinthians 5:19)

We can get over the shock of God’s apportionment of evil, without being numb or dismissive, by studying this scripture. God is in everything, every bit of it. God isn’t compliant with sin or conceding to evil perpetrators. When he allows sin he is healing, nurturing and answering prayers everywhere else. That "something else" thing going on is our working relationship. We must believe that God knows what he is doing. The motivator to God's behavior is explained right there in 2 Corinthians. God is reconciling the world to himself. 

In reconciliation, God backs off. He doesn’t count our trespasses against us as we think he should. Some perpetrators, perhaps it's us, are allowed to sin and urged to confess, to turn back to God, and to reconcile. He backs off, allowing us to sin, allowing evil to proceed, to use them as opportunities of reconciliation. We aren't always kind to those who transgress against us. We often plan revenge and punishment. God does not exact revenge and punishment as we would. 

It helps immensely to know that God allows evil in order for him to exact mercy upon us. We’re not just victims. We’re also the perpetrators. His mercy returns us to him through our confession of sin. Our sins must be made clear to us in order to repent. We cannot be reconciled to God if we expect God to be a hate-filled punisher. We repent out of a desire to get back to God's love. The more we return to God the more we become like him. That’s what he wants. 

It helps also to understand God's motives when we realize he involves us in all reconciliation. God coordinates an apportionment of evil not just as we watch him work. He is “entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.” We're either actively involved in the task of reconciliation, or we're mired in its effects. I listened and watched as this shaken man did that very thing with me on his porch. He expressed how grateful he was to God for reconciling his family. He was deeply affected by the pain, but not absorbed and lost in it. He trusted God.

God reveals his love in the necessary repairs. Every broken thing and person, sorely and even fatally damaged by evil, will be repaired. Another way to look at what God is doing is that he allows only so much evil to take place. Because some evil is stopped in its tracks, hopefully with our cooperation, God is obviously actively orchestrating events. This might seem like an unfair apportionment, but that's just us miscalculating what only God can calculate.

And as hard as it is to grasp, God will ultimately reconcile all of misery and pain. He's fulfilled every promise. This one is next. 

And even more bizarre, as well as brilliant, God has recruited us to join him in explaining that inclusive part of his plan in loving us by involving us. We’re his desired voice box. We're his partners in it. How we react to awful things will witness either the greatness of God or our immature understanding of God's orchestration.

Love reconciles. Love is merciful. Love is gathering us to God. He depends upon us to witness and tell others about him. God will let us be both the perpetrator of evil and evil’s victim. There is no other path to take toward knowing God’s love without remembering that.