God How Could You

I live in the Southwestern part of Virginia, but I work in Washington DC. What that means is that every Sunday afternoon about 3:00 I get in my pickup truck and drive six hours and twenty minutes for my week’s stay. Then on Fridays I get back in the truck and drive home for the weekend. I wouldn’t recommend it for everybody, but it does help pay the bills and serves my latent ADD pretty well, not to mention my in-bred rambling fever.

Sometimes, when I’m lucky, I get to take my wife’s 4 Wheel Drive 2009 Coal Black Jeep Wrangler with the built-in Sirius radio. The 150 plus channels sure make a three hundred and sixty mile trip go by fast. When I don’t get the jeep, then I’m left with my 97 Dodge. It’s a great truck, 160,000 miles, but the cassette deck hasn’t worked for a few years. So for entertainment purposes, I listen to the best that the AM/FM dial has to offer whenever and wherever I can pick it up.

A few weeks ago I was zipping down I-81 about two hours out of DC when I picked up a religious station. It was coming in clear so I decided to give my search finger a rest. Some preacher was going on, sounded like a white guy about my age, probably from a small church somewhere in the Midwest. The subject matter wasn’t too different than anything I’d heard before; how our lives can be in the pits sometimes and on and on. But what really caught my attention that particular moment was how hard this fellow was straining just to get a word out. I mean he sounded awful, worse than Rocky’s boxing manager after an all-night karaoke. But he just kept going, kept plugging away. I remember thinking “well this guy will not be denied”. No he’s not mailing it in tonight, not with this sermon, not this day. He’s going to talk and talk until he blows something, or gets somebody to take his place, or Jesus returns, or they turn off the lights, something. Well all of a sudden, he startled himself, paused a bit, people started clapping and he got to sounding a whole lot better, just like that and right there on the radio. He got all choked up, went completely speechless for what seemed an eternity. He started thanking God and giving glory hallelujahs and then it went silent.

What I would soon learn was that this was not an actual live sermon. It was taped. The preacher was a guest on another program and wanted to share the pre-recorded tape in order to show the world how God in His miraculous glory had cured this non end-stage though chronic bout of laryngitis. Well the program host couldn’t control himself either. He was taking it all in. Two grown men, falling all over each other, giddy jabbering about the love of God and mercy and grace and wonder, and just for fixing this one guy’s throat. I’m just glad it wasn’t on television.

But it did catch my attention; a miracle of sorts and captured right there on audio tape. Reminded me of the time when I was a kid and all my warts went away. But before I started buying into the notion, I decided to do a quick assessment. For one thing, the human body is an amazing thing. Thousands of different systems, 23000 human protein coding genes, around 75 trillion, that’s trillion with a T, cells running 5 billion process every minute. Frankly, I am surprised we don’t break down more often than we do. We’ve got more moving parts than a whole show room full of Saabs, and you know how much time they spend in the shop. No, this body we’ve got is quite a machine to say the least.

What happened next truly put me in a moral conflict. The program closed with the preacher projecting wall to wall, loud and clear, and giving out a web address where you could buy his soon to be released book on that throat miracle of his. The show ended and immediately, like radio broadcasts are apt to do, the news break came up at the top of the hour. The reporter, the lead story was Haiti, and that some 75,000 people were feared dead, dead as in doornails, in the horrific earthquake.

Let’s weigh this out. In one instance, one man, cured of a three year bout with sore throat, versus seventy five thousand men, women, and children all presumed dead due to being crushed by building concrete and other debris, decapitated, bled out, gorged, trampled, suffocation; every which way a person can die from being in an 7.5 Richter scale grade earthquake. All this on this same God’s watch that in just the segment before had gloriously cured one man’s throat and was so highly praised for it. I was stunned by both the turn of events and the seeming paradox.

Is it possible that this same all powerful, omniscient, loving God, one who can cure a white’s man’s ailment in a flash can in yet another flash and different part of the globe bring the immediate and sufferable demise to thousands upon thousands upon thousands of innocent people? This was as spontaneous, but apparently already much worse, as the Tsunami that hit on Christmas day a few years ago in the South Pacific. Though if I had my druthers, I would take drowning over being crushed by a forty foot steel girder any day.

This is horrible plain and simple. There’s no way in the world, given the facts, that any conscientious, genuine, thinking person could lay blame or glory on an all powerful Christian God.

Then again maybe it’s not the Pauline model Christian God that’s running the show these days. I’m thinking Aristotle’s idea of God the Prime Mover could be more appropriate in these circumstances. You know the God who kicks starts existence, linear time, the universe, etc then sort of takes a back seat to everything that follows. Now this version of God, the one without the personal intervention, I can see Him being in charge in times like this.

Of course it could be the Hindu version of the God of karma; you know what goes around comes around. But my guess is that Haiti’s biggest problems weren’t so much the citizens as much as the dudes in charge of the government. So that wouldn’t make sense either considering it was mostly the citizens who bought the farm in the earthquake.

Maybe it was the Deist God who’s at the top now, the One that Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin believed in. The one that “created the universe but is no longer active in it.”

From the looks of things, the total devastation, it was probably the work of one of those mean Roman Gods, like Neptune, we studied in Ancient History. These guys always sounded like serious business to me. I don’t think they ever played favorites and sure seemed to do a lot of maiming in their day.

I don’t know. Trying to reconcile everything that happens in this old world with a Christian God at the helm just doesn’t compute in my mind. Leaves way too many questions unanswered. And I have trouble buying all the conventional one-liners or clichés that most church folks come up with in times like this. In fact, I guess that’s what gets me the most, is the reaction that so many of faith come up with; almost like they are programmed to say the same ole thing. I know Rush Limbaugh talks all the time about the talking points the Democratic libs have. Do you suppose Christians have the same talking points? I wonder if I could get a minor bird to say “God loves you” every time something good or bad happens, could I get that bird into heaven?

Something good happens- “awwwwk God loves you God loves you God loves you”. Something bad happens- “awwwwk God loves you God loves you God loves you”

Is this honestly the best, most sincere and appropriate response that thinking human beings can have when it comes to horrific incidents in this world of ours? Where’s the compassion? To be honest, I’m perfectly fine with the notion that it’s all a part of nature and things just happen, whether it’s with our bodies or an entire island. Things do happen, but surely to goodness events like these are not part of some divine premeditated plan. This ain’t science fiction, and its not cartoons either. Like the farmer once said “Don’t piss on me and tell me it’s raining”. Some of us really are trying to get to the truth.

It’s no big surprise why earthquakes happen. I’m pretty sure that our failure to launch at the Copenhagen Global Warming Summit like Danny Glover suggests or the Haitian Witchcraft like Pat Robinson claims had nothing to do with it, or at least I hope not. The geologic explanation and I quote, is that an earthquake “is caused by an abrupt shift of rock along a fracture in the Earth, called a fault”. Now this makes sense. Why don’t we just leave it at that? Face it. This ole planet is pretty big and in many ways still forming or settling down. This is a big place we live on.

Earthquakes like that, well I’m just glad they don’t happen here where we live. Then again, like I tell folks when I’m traveling, the only two natural disasters we have in SW Virginia are in-breeding and tooth decay.

Church folks love to use parables a lot in their message. Ole Job seems to be the go-to man when a lot of hard times hit, no matter what point they’re trying to get across; even when it comes to rationalizing a natural disaster that has killed 75,000people. OK here’s one. Let’s pretend that you are one of ten kids. Your dad comes home from work, gives you a nice piece of bubble gum. Yep he gives you a piece of bubble gum and then with deliberation and full foresight commences to killing your nine brothers and sisters. Cuts their heads off, shoots them, whatever. He kills everybody else in your family. What would you say about good old dad then? Would he still be your loving dad? Sure you got the gum but what about all the others? How about “that sombitch is damned crazy and needs to be locked up, even if he is my father”; that would seem more like it. What would motivate a person to stay with a dad like that? Would it be love or would it be down-right fear? Would it be based on something he gives you today or are you waiting on some sort of extra special inheritance? How could you stick with a guy like that? Better yet, why would you?

There’s a book out Why Bad Things Happens to Good People. I’m pretty sure is a Biblically based, another feel good sort of rationalization. I haven’t read it, but I can just imagine the punch line; He’s trying to teach us something, trying to teach somebody else something, trying to make you stronger, trying to make you weaker. Hells bells; reminds me of trying to make sense out of my first wife.

It’s a fact that things happen all the time in our lives, good and bad. Not just with our lives, our friends, our families; but mostly to people we don’t even know in places we’ve never been. If I read one more time about a ferry boat flipping over off the coast of India or a bus running off a cliff in the Philippines it will be once too many. Stuff is happening all the time. And my guess is that there probably just about as many tragedies happen as there are joys. I’m just not so sure it’s fact that God’s behind any of it at all.