What do you do when the bottom falls out? That question has been pressing itself harder and harder into our consciences this year. Take a brief walk through the last month and change. A terror attack at the Boston Marathon killed three and injured more than 200. An explosion at a fertilizer plant in Waco, Texas, on the same day killed another 15 and left another 200 injured. In the ensuing weeks at least three major scandals have rocked the political world and are quickly trickling down to Main Street.
As if that were not enough, after reports suggested that tornadic activity was at an all-time low, a week ago 10 twisters took the lives of six people and injured more than 100. Barely giving a reeling nation pause to catch our breath, the news and images of the devastation in Moore, Okla., sucked away whatever was remaining and has left many wondering just how far the fall is going to be before the ground brings us to a quick halt. And this brief summary does not even touch on international tragedies in the form of earthquakes, storms and the costs of war over the same period.
Jonathan Waits
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Each of these events, though, while a shock to the conscience of the nation, was external to most of us. Other than giving them some extra thought and saying a few extra prayers for those affected, for most of us our lives are not terribly bothered by these kinds of things. We may be brought to a place of asking some hard questions, but we don’t usually wait around very long for the answers.
Tragedy for my family, however, was not finished. In the midst of this tumultuous news cycle and on a busy Wednesday evening, my wife and I received some personally devastating news. Now tragedy had come home. Even writing those words still brings a lump to my throat. We experienced what everyone fears when tragedy has struck somewhere else: the transition from out there to right here. Now real tears were shed. Now the hard questions demanded answers and were not going away without them. Now it seemed chaos really was running the show.
How do you make sense out of tragedy like this? How do we respond when chaos seems to rule the day? What do you do when it seems like the bottom has fallen out?
This is a question that everyone must ask at some point. We cannot escape it. Sorrow and loss are part of this world and there is nothing we can do to avoid them. And in those moments when they find us we begin searching for answers, we begin searching for God. We search in all kinds of places, some helpful, some not. We look high and low. We seek because somewhere deep inside of all of us — whether we have embraced the Christian worldview and its explanation of these moments or not — we have an innate sense that even though this experience has been common to every person who has ever walked the face of the planet, still this is not how things are supposed to be. We have a taste of eternity in our hearts and eternity can’t be filled with pain like this. As author Joseph Loconte remarks in his remarkable book, The Searchers, “The desire to find meaning in the blackest moments of our lives seems to be an intrinsic part of our nature; we can’t really let go of the quest.”
How do two young men who are living in a land where they have a greater opportunity to embrace and experience life than anywhere else in the world turn from this and embrace death to the point of seeking to bring it to as many people as possible? How can God allow a tragic accident to blow apart over a dozen families? How can we account for a loving God who carefully maintains his creation in the face of senseless storms that have so far claimed the lives of at least 25 people, many of whom were children? Why did my wife and I experience this personal tragedy when we hadn’t done anything wrong? These kinds of questions demand answers and won’t be satisfied until they find them.
Here’s the good news: I think there are answers to these and others like them. Here’s the hard news: these answers are not quick or glib and very well may not take a form that we will easily recognize. Like Jesus’ seemingly enigmatic response to his cousin’s question of whether or not he really was “the One,” sometimes the answers come in hard-to-swallow packages. What more, as Loconte further notes, “The Christian faith, the faith according to Jesus, does not promise us immediate answers to all our most agonizing questions. We will not be given unwavering belief. We will not — in this life — find the comfort that we seek. There is no sadness shield.”
With bleary eyes and unsettled hearts, then, how do we move forward? The answer is found in rooting ourselves deeply in the truth. It comes with three parts and a warning, but it will have to wait until part 2.
Jonathan Waits ([email protected]) is pastor of Central Baptist Church in Church Road, Va.