Norway & The Will of God

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith from a place of winter For the Years of Winter…


I have been struggling with the most recent mass murder, the one in Norway. Trying to understand. Trying to pray. Trying to re-channel my own rage into something constructive.

As usual, I am not being very successful.

I’m not helped by an abcessed tooth. There is this dull, constant, throbbing pain in my head. It beats in disharmony with the dull, constant, throbbing pain in my soul. Why is there so much evil in the world? Why are we so evil?

I have lived a long time, and I am supposed to be wise because of it, but I have no answers, no wisdom. Indeed, one of the worst things about living in the years of winter is the accumulation of evil. When I was twenty, an evil act of destruction was new in my experience. I thought I could do something about it. Now I have observed countless acts of destruction, singular and mass, and I have not been able to do anything about them.

So why not curse God and die? That was the advice Job’s wife gave him. [Job 2:9]

At the end of her life, Isabella Beecher Hooker, the social activist among the thirteen remarkable children of Lyman and Roxana (& Harriet) Beecher [1], was bemoaning the state of the world. “Well, at least you have the satisfaction of knowing you did all you could about the world’s evil during your lifetime,” said her granddaughter. “That’s the problem,” said Isabella. “When I was young, I could do something about it. Now I can’t do anything.”

When Steve and Tony, the 18 and 19 year old sons of my older sister were killed in a car crash, I said at their funeral that this was NOT the will of God. “God does not will that beautiful young men should be cut down before they’ve even really started growing. It is the law of physics that when a small car and a large truck collide, the people in the small car will get hurt, but God does not pull strings to cause these things to happen. This was NOT the will of God.” I must have said it ten times in one way or another.

That night, as Dick, their father, and I sat in his darkened study in masculine silence, the president of the sports booster club came by. [Tony was quarterback on the football team.] “Well, as you said earlier,” he said to me, “it was the will of God.”

I was astonished. I know I’m not the world’s best preacher, but I’m a pretty accurate communicator. How could he turn my words around to say the exact opposite of what I had preached? Then it came to me: he wasn’t saying God caused this. He was just saying that in the midst of the tragedy, God was still in charge, that the everlasting arms are still upholding, even in the midst of evil, perhaps especially there, God is the only reason, the only hope, the only cause worth serving.

JRMcF

1] Lyman had 9 children with Roxana Foote. When she died, he married Harriet Porter and had four more. Harriet was Isabella’s mother. The most famous of the children were Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Arthur is my favorite. The first month he was the Presbyterian pastor in Elmira, NY, he was thrown out of the ministerial association for heresy. For the next 37 years he never missed a meeting of the association, although he was never readmitted to membership. Think about that—he got free coffee every month but never had to pay dues or be an officer or serve on a committee!

The “place of winter” mentioned in the title line is Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where life is defined by winter even in the summer!

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{I also write the fictional “Periwinkle Chronicles” blog. One needs a rather strange sense of humor to enjoy it, but occasionally it is slightly funny. It is at http://periwinklechronicles.blogspot.com/}

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