The President summed up the week well. "All in all it’s been a tough week." In Boston, marathon runners were dismembered by exploding bombs, and a race was abruptly halted in the midst of the chaos. A massive explosion leveled a Texas fertilizer plant. Elsewhere, a police officer was shot and killed. In Colorado, gunfire erupted at a park celebration. In Southern California, brush fires caused the evacuation of hundreds of homes. My own "tough week" didn’t draw national attention, but it was still there, and it was the same week. I had interrupted the busyness of receiving and organizing registrations for an annual conference to fly cross-country for a sexual abuse investigation. That alone brought its own apprehensions as I relived a hurtful past. And then the phone calls started coming from home. My husband was sick with diverticulitis. Oh, and he had kidney stones too. A close friend’s daughter committed suicide. And someone disabled the account I had with my email server so the registrations I was supposed to be receiving were being returned to their senders. Heartache, tragedy, trauma, inconvenience, displacement, frustration, concern, questions. All in all, it was a tough week.
How do we understand God when our weeks are tough weeks? Tough weeks do have the tendency to reveal our beliefs about God. Does He really care? Did He maybe, possibly, sort of, lose a bit of control???? Does He understand the limitations of a single human being? Do individuals truly matter to God – although sometimes it seems even the crowd gets overlooked. Why do innocent people suffer because of the deranged or distorted thinking of someone who is far from innocent? Is God able to stop the open onslaught of men who seem to exude evil? And if God could stop the onslaught, why didn’t He? Jonah was having a tough week when God told him to go to Ninevah and warn its people of impending judgment. How fair was it for God to give a warning to an enemy that reeked with violence???? Getting swallowed by an oversized fish on his way to superficial obedience, Jonah still sat smugly in his own prejudices, angry with a God he just did not understand.
There are some other things about God too that I really don’t understand. I don’t understand the toughest week He and His Son, His only Son, shared together. Speaking of tragedy – and add to it, torture and humiliation, lies and ridicule and misunderstanding – it was a tragedy beyond any dimensions I am capable of understanding. The physical tragedy of a body beaten, shoved, spit upon, nails driven into His flesh .... suffocation. The shameful tragedy of nakedness and those who gawked and taunted. The relational and emotional tragedy of a child who preceded a mother in death, and who left friends in the darkness of their questions. The relational tragedy that echoed in the words of a son to His father, "My God, my God, why have you left me all alone?" And in reflecting on God’s toughest week, I don’t understand why He would do it all for me. Why me? Why would He care? Why would He give in such incomprehensible ways? His tough week makes my own tough weeks possible. His tough week embraces every tough week I have with His love, His understanding, and His care – even when to me, it doesn’t make any sense at all.
O God, I do not understand. My child, it is not for you to understand, but to trust, and to rest.
– Bev
(Related Bible reading: Mark 15:24-34)
