My "Why?" Box

A few days in to the new year, a friend of mine was in a bad car accident. It was not her fault, and the other driver fled the scene and has yet to be found. While her injuries were mercifully minimal, the toll on my friend's life has been anything but.

For months and months, I had been working with this single, young friend to help her move beyond a stuck place in her life. She was beginning to take some baby steps toward becoming unstuck. I had new hope for her. She had new vision for herself. God had heard our cries, and things were looking up. Then she went out to pick up burgers one night, a mile from her house, and her progress was hijacked by a guy who ran a red light.

It wouldn't be enough to say we were back at square one. We were at negative ten. This is where, for the purposes of this blog, the story stops being about her and starts being about me and God.

I am not new to this faith thing. I committed my life to Christ at the age of 10 and got really serious about Him at 23. I have years, decades, of experience walking in faith. I have seen Him meet needs time and time again. My roots are deep, and I've lived a lot of years feeling mostly unshakable.

But this senseless car accident, so devastating to someone I'm heavily invested in, dealt a blow to my faith. As I made hundreds of circles around my backyard prayer track crying out to God, I latched on to just one word and held on with all my might: Why? Why, God, would you allow this to happen? Why would you allow my friend's progress and hope to be stolen? Why did it have to be her car? Why did it have to be so bad? Why would you leave her traumatized, carless, and unable to work? Why, why, why?

Yes, I could be grateful that she came out alive. That her injuries weren't worse. I thanked Him for those things, but only when my obsession with "why" allowed me a quick breather. Then the questions came right back.

I'm not much of a visual person, but it seems that the more time I spend with God, the more He gives me pictures to make His points. He began putting a picture in my mind of a big, heavy box labeled "WHY?" And then He asked me (in that way in which God speaks to us without literally speaking while still letting us know it's definitely Him) if I would be willing to put that box on a shelf. He wasn't asking me to destroy it, just to set it aside.

Now if by some strange turn of events I allowed you a peek at my closet, after first gasping in horror you would then see that there is no room on a shelf for even a small box, let alone a big one. But in His graciousness, God's picture to me included a nice, clean, open shelf, ready and waiting to receive my large box.

Was I willing to set aside my need for understanding? To trust that He is always working for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purposes, whether we can see that happening or not? Was I willing to move past "Why?" and receive whatever He had for me on the other side of my letting go?

My fingers were clenched. It wasn't an easy release. It also wasn't a one-time thing. I had to do it over and over again; in fact, I'm still doing it, weeks later. When "Why?" pops back into my mind, bringing its discouragement with it, I have to keep releasing it and putting it away. There are a number of things that compel me to do this.

First, I see the ridiculousness and arrogance of it, as if God ever needs to explain Himself to me. ("Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth; tell me if you know so much." --Job 38:4.) Second, it's a big, heavy box, and carrying it was exhausting. And third, I knew that if I kept my hands full with it, I wouldn't be able to receive anything else. I also see His patience, kindness, and understanding in asking me to place my questions on a shelf. He didn't yell at me for picking up the box in the first place, and He didn't demand that I burn it. I just needed to set it aside. I'm sure He also knows that on other occasions, I'll find a step stool, pull the box down, and fill it with different contents. What's inside might change, but the "Why?" label will stay the same, and the box will always be tempting.

Still, I've seen that those roots of faith are deep. Way down deep, they anchor me to a truth much bigger than any boxes I may pick up along the way: I can trust God with everything.

"I believe; help my unbelief!" (Mark 9:24)

Justice, Yes, But Also Forgiveness

The sound of careers--lives, really--crashing to the ground echoes out of my television every time I turn on the nightly news. One more movie star, artist, athlete, journalist, or politician is brought to trial in the courtroom of public opinion, and a guilty verdict is all but guaranteed. It doesn't matter if the statutes of limitations has passed by 20 years. It doesn't matter that whatever incident has placed them in this position wasn't even illegal. The only thing that matters is that someone has messed up, and justice must be served.

Justice is good. Justice is important to God. It's important in keeping a society safe, intact, and healthy. No one wants to live in a world without justice. But no one wants to live in a world without forgiveness either.

One of the most important parts of being human is our ability to be vulnerable and tell the truth about ourselves. We've all messed up. We all did something colossally stupid at some point in our lives. Our imperfections, mistakes, and failures unite us as human beings. No one's doing this life thing perfectly. We're all tripping all over ourselves, if not today then yesterday, and if not yesterday then tomorrow. Wisdom is hard won. The Bible says all we have to do is ask for wisdom and God will give it, but it doesn't usually come in a beautiful package wrapped in a bow. His gift of wisdom often comes on the other side of a mess we've made. Growth through mistakes is another uniting human force.

My concern, as I watch the evening news and hear the crumbling, is that people are going to stop telling the hard truth about themselves. We'll be denied their stories of growth and transformation because they're too afraid to admit they were flawed in the first place. 

My concern is that no decent, respectable person will ever run for public office again because of something foolish they did at 19.

My concern is that we're headed toward a world where justice is everything, and forgiveness is seen as weakness.

We need both. People need to be held accountable for their actions. We all need to know that what we do and say matters and has consequences. We need to become wise enough to recognize when "I'm so sorry" is the only acceptable thing to say. But we also need to forgive. We need to live graciously, understanding that people make mistakes, and that those mistakes don't necessarily represent the sum total of a person's life. A consistent pattern of bad behavior is one thing. A foolish, ill-timed comment is another. I made two yesterday. What about you? And aren't you thankful that your life didn't come crashing down as a result? What about a horrible act of bad judgment that hurt another person? Yes, I've done that as well. Thankfully, the acts have gotten less horrible, the judgment less bad, and the hurt less severe over the years, but if anyone wants to dig around my high school past, they'll find plenty to condemn me with. It may not be recorded on fuzzy 1980's video or plastered on my yearbook pages (especially since I was the yearbook editor), but that doesn't mean it's not there.

Oh, but the grace of God. The forgiveness of God and other people. These have transformed me. This is my story. If you want to know who I am today, who I really am, you're going to need to hear about who I used to be, and how grace changed me. How it's still changing me.

Can we be a society that upholds justice while leaving plenty of room for grace and forgiveness? I pray that we can.