What Does God Have To Do With This IF Hell? Pt 2

One day, my Pastor said something that caught my attention.   During his message he referenced the book When Bad Things Happen to Good People by Harold Kushner.   Kushner was a rabbi who had a child with a long-term terminal disease.  He knows grief, pain and suffering well from his personal and professional life.  The pastor had mentioned this book before, but the title turned me off.  I thought it sounded kind of presumptuous.

I decided to read it anyways.  There are not many books that I can say have changed my life.   This one did.

It validated my grief in a way that I had never allowed myself to experience  before.   It pointed out many of the hurtful things people had said to me in an effort to comfort me, some of which I had in turn said to myself.  I made a private vow to erase the phrase "everything happens for a reason" from my vocabulary.   It showed me the hollowness in these words.

(Warning, semi-spoiler alert... ) 

The book goes through principles that many people who believe in God would like to believe.

1.  God is all-powerful and causes everything that happens in the world.  

Nothing happens without His willing it. 

2.  God is just and fair, and stands for people getting what they deserve, 

so that the good prosper and the wicked are punished.  

Based on the author's explanation, he suggests that these two things can not exist together.   He argues that there is randomness in the universe, and that it is the cause of the bad things that happen to people.  He says that some people would rather convince themselves that God is cruel, or that they are sinners rather than accept randomness.

Reading this book freed me.  It allowed me to find middle ground.   It took the pressure off.  It allowed me to throw away the "everything" shoe for good.   God didn't push reset on my sister's life.   He didn't deal her that hand.  He didn't deal us this infertility.  We didn't do anything to deserve it.

This book has been marinating on my heart now for several months.  And it's kind of funny.  I'm yet again back to pondering the same question "Where's God in all of this?", but now in a much different way.  I've taken Him out of the beginning and the end of the equation.  He didn't do this to us, and He can't fix it either.  Instead, I'm trying to see how He can help get me through.

I'm certainly not there yet.  I struggle to pray and find myself wondering what there is to pray for if God can't change this anyways?   Kushner offers a chapter on what God can do? and what good is religion?    He offers partial answers to me, the explanations are not nearly as concise and coherently written as the first part of the book.

What I am left with however, is his thought that we can "turn to God, not to be judged or forgiven, not to be rewarded or punished, but to be strengthened and comforted."  My pastor says that God is the great recycler.  He can work in situations in your life that he didn't create.


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Other snippets from the book: 

- "I would find it easier to believe that I experience tragedy and suffering in order to "repair" that which is faulty in my personality if there were some clear connection between the fault and the punishment.  A parent who disciplines a child for doing something wrong, but never tells them what he is being punished for is hardly a model of responsible parenthood". 

- "Can we accept the interpretation of tragedy as a test?...If God is testing us, he must know by know that many of us fail the test.  If He is only giving us the burdens we can bear, I have seen him miscalculate far too often."

-"We fasten our hopes on the idea that life in this world is not the only reality.  Somewhere beyond this life is another world where "the last shall be first".  

-"Blaming the victim is a way of reassuring ourselves that the world is not as bad a place as it may seem, and that there are good reasons for people's suffering.  It helps fortunate people believe that their good fortune is deserved, rather than being a matter of luck". 

- "If we are not free to choose evil, then we are not free to choose good either"

- "The God I believe in does not send us the problem; he gives us the strength to cope with the problem. 

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What Does God Have to Do With This IF Hell? Pt 1

There's a "God" question keeps haunting me. A pesky, annoying little thought that circles my brain in my quietest moments.  Kind of like a song that gets stuck in your head, but it's been hanging around for a years now in a few different variations.

A lot of times it shows up as "Why me?" or on my more hormonal days "What the F*$%, universe?", one way or another though, it somehow boils down to "What does God have to do with this IF hell we are experiencing?"

Thinking about this is kind of tiresome.  And sometimes boring. I wish I could just forget it and move on with things.    The easy answers in my mind are "everything" or "nothing".   And, for the biggest portion of my life, I tried on the "nothing" shoe.   I wore it around, trying to live a good and productive life, but it never quite fit me right.

Four years ago,  I was granted a year long leave of absence from my career.  One of the things I wanted to do was to with my time, was to try on the other shoe.  I wanted to learn a little more about religion and spirituality, if nothing more than as a neat social experiment where I got to understand some of my fellow humans a bit better.   I felt like this "God thing" is a big deal, possibly having implications beyond this life.  I wanted to figure out what I believed, one way or another.   A big part of me wanted to read a few things, decide it was all bunk and continue  on living my life, happily wearing my "nothing" shoe.

My plan was to visit different churches and if they were interesting, research their over-arching values.  I didn't want to find something that felt like a fit, only to find that I couldn't stomach their values on a particular topic.  This is what happened to me in my childhood and adolescence.

The first church we went to I surprisingly liked.  It was vastly different than any other church experience that I had ever had.  First, there were people that didn't have just white or grey hair.  It was uplifting, thoughtful, had good music and dare I say... almost fun.    We started getting to know people, and their values.    I would describe the congregation and leadership as current, grounded and open minded.  We really liked it and decided to stay a while.

Early on in our experiences with the church and becoming more spiritual in general, some major things happened.  On the day that we were scheduled to have our first IVF, my sister had a massive stroke.  I just started to feel a bit of peace with some of my "God stuff".  The stroke and a few other oddly coincidental occurrences in my life, started to feel almost .... planned.   I had just left my professional career that I once devoted most of my life to (where I was a borderline workaholic), and boom, 6 months later, I was thrust into caring for my sister full time.

I started putting the "everything" shoe on more and more and toying with the idea that everything happens for a reason.  Admittedly, it wasn't a perfect fit.  I couldn't wrap my brain around to factor in free will, something mentioned in the bible quite a few times from what I've learned.  I tried to talk myself through God handing out punishments, like a parent does for a child.  In a loving, purposeful way.

I didn't share it, but I found comfort in these thoughts for quite some time.  I felt like maybe the reason why we had experienced IF was because I was meant to care for my sister?  There was no one else in our family that was able to devote themselves to her recovery in the way that I was.  Her care was in a large city and was several hours from where everyone lived.   Everyone else had work and other conflicting commitments, except for me.

Maybe her life was headed down some terrible path that was completely unforeseeable?  Maybe this stroke was a way of God pushing "reset" on her life (and mine?)

Caring for her gave me a sense of purpose like I had not experienced before.  Our mother had a hard time dealing with her recent divorce from our Dad and she wasn't able to be there for us emotionally.   And so, for a couple of years my relationship with my sister morphed into to more of a parent-child relationship.   I secretly wondered if this new found sense of purpose was a little bit of how parenting might feel?

Her stroke was one of the most challenging things I have ever been through.  It stands there along side the long lasting grief surrounding our infertility and miscarriages.    Immediately after her stroke she had no mobility in her arm and reduced mobility in her leg.  She lost one quarter of her vision and had had cognitive impairments that she was unable to recognize.  Watching therapists delicately point them out to her was gut wrenching.   The depression that she experienced before the stroke penetrated much deeper, and got to frightening levels.

It still chokes me up to think about the "hand she was dealt" and it's been three and a half years.  I watched as almost every part of her life was stripped away; her independence as her livelihood and driver's license was revoked, her appearance (including having half of her skull temporarily removed to stop life threatening swelling in her brain), having a lifeless arm hanging off of her body.  Her social life mostly disappeared  as as her "friends" quietly faded away and her extra curricular activities turned into time spent in therapy.   In her once budding career as a teacher, she now would face huge challenges to perform tasks that were once ordinary for her.

I watched her fight tooth and nail.  At the beginning, by staring at her fingers for hours.  Her therapists suggested using visualization techniques to assist her brain to build a detour around the dead spot in her brain.  Weeks into her recovery, her thumb twitched for the first time.    Every.single.part of her recovery seemed to be equally hard won.   Watching her do it was one of the most difficult things (I hope) I'll ever witness, but also one of the most amazing.

The doctors say that she won a good lottery and a bad one.  Bad that this awful thing happened to her, and there was no cure, because that they could find the cause.  It was just a "random event" they said.  Good in that she was able to recover better than any of her doctors would have predicted.    Today she has her drivers licence, can move her arm and hand with almost a full range of motion.  She has been supply teaching, and has a new supportive and wonderful boyfriend.

Thinking that this happened for a reason helped me to help her.  It helped me patient with her, and support her when I thought I had nothing left to give.

The crisis faded, and we both moved back into our own realities.   We resumed our fertility treatments after a year long hiatus.  Two subsequent miscarriages on top of the grief we had already experienced rocked us.   I began thinking of things like why little babies, who could have not possibly done anything wrong could be born into horrible circumstances.  What could that baby have possibly done wrong?  What kind of God would do that?   Not a God that I wanted anything to do with.  My "everything" shoe began to come loose.

.....

(I never intended this post to be so long... or about this... It's funny how for me blogging has a way of lifting something off my heart that I didn't know was sitting so close to the surface.  I've run out of time today.  To be continued...