Did God? Or Did I?

Last weekend has left me pondering the supremacy of God in tension with the free will of humanity.

Two tragic deaths occurred within hours of each other. On Thursday night, friends lost their infant son. He was born with a rare heart condition but lived long enough for the natural familial love to grow stronger through enjoying daily interactions and reveling in his personality. On Friday morning, my husband and I were driving to a church event and came upon the detour caused by a crash which resulted in the death of a husband and father from our church. A semi-driver had failed to notice the intersection.

How does faith meet with real life when we desperately desire to discover that it has all been a bad dream?

I know that God allows choice. He started with Adam and Eve and hasn't changed since then. We know what they chose. Is that what God wanted? Or did He give them the choice in spite of what they would do with their freedom? Was their disobedience and His plan for buying humanity back His original plan, or was it some sort of beautiful patch-up job?

But I also know that God had every day of every life numbered before a person draws breath. That means that, should someone hold a gun to my head, I can rest easy because, if it is not in God's plan that I die that day, there is nothing that person could do to kill me; yet, if God's story for my present life
closes at that point, nothing anyone does can change it.

So which is it?

Did God's plan make allowance for disease and human error and plain evil, knowing all the while that He could still work beauty?

Or were these tragedies part of His will from the get-go since no one can change what He has done?

And what about moral failure? Surely this is another sort of death, as Adam and Eve discovered. Surely God's plan couldn't actually include sin in the life of His child!

I know that I am not the first to ask these question. I will certainly not be the last. Yet knowing that I am not alone in the confusion provides poor comfort.

These morose mental musings of mine received an abrupt shaking on Monday morning, when a text surprised me. Our fourth nephew had decided to make an early entrance, and the joy of a new life appeared as a beacon, as if this new development promised that a turn for the better had taken place.

His safe and unexpected arrival jolted me enough that I could grab some perspective: there's more going on in all of this.

Whatever combination of God's plan and human action occurred this past weekend, the result is that two are in heaven, and God is making their stories beautiful. They have life like never before, joy beyond our imaginings. They receive His rest as they await their bodily resurrection.

When God's child fails - and every one of us will until we are finally and fully freed from sin through the first death - there is another (sort of) resurrection that can occur. With the admission of guilt and the plea for forgiveness comes a continuing of the new life that breathes into us from the time of salvation to our physical death. We are not saved again, but we are reminded of our death to sin and our being raised to new life in Christ. We begin again, much like beginning a new life, continuing to trust in His plans for us.

And they are good plans.

I know that, whatever the God-ordained combination might be of my working and His planning, His eyes never widen in alarm over my decisions, and He works my decisions into His will. It doesn't matter that I can't understand it all. (That's why He is God and I am not!) What matters is my response: trust? or panic?

And much like the birth of our little nephew this Monday morning, hope is born in my heart with every reminder of God's overwhelming love for me, of His gift of more grace than I know what to do with, of my freedom from striving and guilt.
And it comes unexpectedly.
And it comes beautifully.

Oh, What a Beautiful Morning!

The sun is finally shining in southwestern Minnesota, and spring seems only a breath away. I don’t want to think about all of April still waiting, always holding the possibility for one more blizzard before winter finally gives up its hold.

The warmth is all the more welcome thanks to temperatures that can’t seem to make up their mind. Old man winter has been taunting us with unusually warm spells in strange months, followed by a return of the cold that seems to want to make up for its absence through sheer brutality of temperature and wind.

The kindly sun gave such welcome reprieve from the natural coldness of the land I live in. He came when I least expected it, letting me revel in his smile, coaxing me out of my natural environs and out into his beautiful world. So, when the sun was hidden, when he was taken away and the world was plunged back into cold shadows, everything seemed twice as dark, twice as bitter, as it would have without the warm interlude. Who could know that the sun was not gone forever, only hidden for a while?

But, yesterday morning, the sun was back! The breeze was soft, and all creation called me to celebrate.

I jogged to the corner of two county roads and felt like flinging my head back and my arms wide, offering a laughing embrace to the sun, the budding trees, this world of renewed life.

What a perfect time of year to celebrate the return of the sun!

Now go back to the paragraph that begins, “The kindly sun…,” and replace every u in “sun” with an o, for the significance of this time is not only in the return of summer.

Jesus had been walking the land of Palestine, ministering, teaching, leading, blessing, rebuking. His faithful followers included not only the twelve disciples, but others who believed, men and women, some of whom ministered to the Lord through financial support and the provision of life necessities. Here was a group of people who knew little other than that their lives had been burst in upon by a light that they hadn’t formerly known was lacking. They had lived the drudging day-in and day-out of an occupied people, wresting an existence for themselves somewhere between their land and their rulers.

And then, Jesus came.

He came preaching abundant life, offering water that quenched all thirst forever, bread that filled to the uttermost. He lived the prophecies of old, embodying all they had watched for since the time of Abraham and Moses. Here was a man with enough compassion to be a king, enough deity to serve. He was the sun on their faces and the relief of the burdens.

And then he died.

Don’t skip ahead. Before there was a Sunday resurrection, there was a Friday crucifixion.

Oh, there had been warnings. The religious leaders had been wanting Him out of the way for a long time. He had even tried to let them know what was coming, but they hadn’t believed Him. Surely, this was another of His teaching devices, another parable or parallel. Surely He wouldn’t waste everything He had accomplished by letting His enemies catch Him! He had already avoided their grasp numerous times, almost as if He had closed their eyes or weighted their arms so that He easily eluded them, much like Elisha had when the king of Aram sought tocapture him. Could not the one who opened eyes also close them, who gave movement to limbs also take it away?

But, oh!, that Thursday night, in the garden, betrayed by His own! Surely the heartsick disciples ran back and told the women all that had happened. Their Lord, caught! Arrested! On trial!

All that long night, surely they clung to the hope of His acquittal.

Yet, as Friday dawned, He was still under arrest.

The one who raised the widow’s son from death was Himself condemned to die.

But can you kill one who gives life? they must have wondered. As He dragged that wooden beam down the Via Dolorosa, back torn from the whip, face bloody from the thorny crown, eyes swollen nearly shut from beatings, did the inevitable begin to weigh on their souls?

As the women watched, as nails pierced the hands that had healed them, as another was driven through feet they had washed, did they still look to the heavens, watching for the justice that would surely come on the wings of angels?

The skies were silent.

Silence above, but not beneath, as other bystanders began to curse Him, taunt Him. “He saved others; can He not save Himself?” How cruel are the jeers that echo aloud those silent questions that had already taken root in their own spirits!

And He died.

The earth shook with the calamity. The sun fled. The creator had been killed. The light had been extinguished.

They went home, those brave, broken-hearted women, but not before they had seen where He was to be safely entombed. They had before gladly found a place for His head to rest; they would not neglect this final duty for His broken body.

How long and dark is the night where there is no hope! How heavy the soul of those who resent their own hearts’ persistence in beating life through the body. How restless the person who cannot sit, cannot stand, but must only lie prostrate in wordless supplications of mind-numbed grief.

Where the sun has warmed, the cold of its absence is most keenly felt.

That following Sabbath day must have been the longest of all Sabbaths.

Did they attempt to follow the prescribed rituals? Did they seek comfort through the familiar? Or did they see a reminder of Him and His teaching in every hour of that day?

However they spent those interminable minutes and hours, at last the sun relented and went down, announcing the departure of their holy day. Maybe then they sought the blessed relief of unconsciousness, or maybe they knew that sleep would once again elude them and they instead began to prepare for their final ministry to their Lord. Whichever they chose, “while it was still dark” they were ready.

I can hear the most cautious of them – perhaps Joanna or Mary, the mother of James – cautioning against going too early. Danger lurked for a woman (or even a group of women) in the night shadows of first-century Palestine. Finally that dear, careful woman was convinced, “It is as safe now as it will be at mid-day,” her guarded mind at last giving way to the urgent pleadings of both her anguished heart and grieving friends.

They clutched their anointing spices to their tunics, arms prickling from the chilly morning air, hurrying in groups of twos and threes through the shadowed streets and out toward the last place they had seen their Master and Teacher.

They had heard many stories in the past three years from those who sought out the Lord. They knew of families who had traced Him simply by listening to stories of healing and asking which way He had gone. Those families wanted to hear His words or to beg His cure for a daughter, a son, a sibling, spouse, or parent. How many times those families had heard the disappointing words, “You just missed Him!”

But today, this Sunday morning, those words were given to them, “He is not here."

What? How can He not be here? Where does a dead man go? If the dead are not in the tombs, where are they to be found?

And then, the joyously unthinkable.

“He is risen!”

Risen?

The word tugged at a string of memory, of his sayings regarding His death and, yes!, His resurrection! Those words that they had dismissed in the glow of His health and had forgotten in His last gasp of life – were they true? Did they mean even what He had said?

From the time of Adam’s sin, death had had the final word. Even the Shunammite’s son, though once brought back from its clutches, had eventually died again. How were they to understand when death itself worked backwards?

They did not grasp all the theological points, all the ins and outs and ramifications of their discovery, but they knew that their beloved Shepherd lived again.

Later, as He appeared to one of their own, to the disciples, and to the other believers, later they would reflect on all this meant.

Later, they would see the world-reaching implications of what had been revealed to them.

Later, they would look back on this first Easter morning as the brightest of their lives.

But now, at this moment, as they rushed back to the city as the first carriers of the gospel, now all they knew, all they cared about, was that this was indeed an oh-so-beautiful morning!