The call that changed everything came in the parking lot.
I was going to a late weekend breakfast with my husband. We were laughing and talking when my phone rang, and I answered, because my mom wouldn’t call at such a time for no reason. Her voice was choked when I answered the phone: “Mr. L passed away this morning.”
And oh, it was sad, because Mr. L was the kindest and gentlest man I knew. He crocheted; he opened the doors for everyone at church; he took his wife to Hardee’s every morning of their retirement for a biscuit combo and they talked lovingly to each other over those breakfasts every day. He repaired lawn mowers and cars for free. He loved our church and routinely showed up to fix it or provide maintenance, and he accompanied his wife as the stalwart presence on her “missions of mercy” to visit the sick and comfort the dying and bring food and help to those who needed it.
So: sad. But sad in a way I understood, because he was getting older, and it was not unheard of for a seventy-year old man to—
“He killed himself,” my mother blurted, and broke down. “He shot himself.”
And so he had. When his wife slipped off to get her purse for breakfast, she heard a gunshot ring out in the kitchen. And when she came back he was on the floor, dying. In a panic, she called my mother to come help her right after she called an ambulance.
That was the day—the exact day—that the easy answers stopped making sense to me.
There was no “everything happens for a reason,” that I could believe or chirp to my mother, who had—grimly, helping in the only way to help she knew how—cleaned viscera off the floor after the ambulance took him away. There was no “let go, let God” to his wife. Even the comforts of heaven and the glory of God and all the good promises seemed to dull beside the awful, awful pain of the present.
I grew frustrated in the years following at the ease with which some people seemed to accept sorrows like this. I thought they were glossing over the hurt. Denying it. I simply couldn’t process it, how I was supposed to accept something so awful could have happened to two godlypeople I knew and loved, the two people who—if you had demanded I choose—represented best the living daily love of God in the world to me.
For a time that I am not proud of and have since repented for, I found myself quite scornful of those who did find comfort in simple answers. My mother was one such person. She had witnessed the worst of it, the awfulness of that profound horror, and yet this did not dissuade her from sending me gentle cards with Scriptural truths, cheerful reminders, or underlined sentences from Bible studies:
God will never abandon you.
The Lord understands our deepest hurts.
No matter what happens, the Lord will create good from it.
I wondered if my inability to accept such answers at times—or even to tolerate them well—made me a bad Christian, at risk of becoming a nonbeliever. And so once, I asked her. “You have such confidence,” I blurted. “But you know how bad things can be. You know how awful it can be. But then you say all these things with such ease and believe them, so what’s wrong with me that I struggle so much to get to where you are?”
She neither condemned nor chastised me. Instead, she sat and thought a while. “Well, we’re different people,” she said. “To be honest, I like things simple. I don’t like asking a lot of questions, or thinking too hard or deep about something. But that’s not you. But God made you a thinker. He made you to ask a lot of questions. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s good! I couldn’t do that, just like you can’t do this. Just keep asking Him, that’s all.”
It was not until after she died that I got the answer to those questions I kept faithfully asking.
Here’s the thing. The contempt I felt in response to those “easy answers” neglected something profound that I could not experience except through her death—that God suffered, suffers, too. We know this of course, intellectually. But to understand it spiritually is a different matter, and under the domain of the Holy Spirit only.
An easy answer is only easy when it comes without cost. Under my bewilderment was a sneaking suspicion that God somehow didn’t know how bad it was or could be down here, that I had a claim to turn my face to heaven and say, “How can you ask me to accept this when you don’t know what it’s like?”
But He does know.
And He has experienced it, the worst of it.
My mother was able to trust God easily because she knew—had experienced, in a way I had not yet—that God knelt and wept with her over what happened to Mr. L. Because she knew that the horror and grief of it was something that God noted and saw individually, and was also part of the great tide of horror and grief that has suffused humanity since the Fall. Because she knew it was that sorrow, singular, and the great sorrow, more broadly, that God intended to heal. Because she knew God knew exactly what it was like, not by depending on her experience but by facing it with His own.
This isn’t really something you learn through study. It’s something you only learn through intimacy with suffering. That’s the only way I know how to explain it. These answers aren’t a truth you can intellectualize or will yourself to receive however badly you might want to do so. They come in the fullness of time and God’s will; they come through deep sorrow. And they come with great, great comfort, in the end.
So I suppose what I want to repeat is what my mother said to me long ago. It’s okay if God made you to be a thinker. It’s okay to struggle and to wonder and to ask questions. Even if everyone around you seems to “get it” with unquestioning cheer, know that God either made them that way or taught them, and He will teach you. Keep asking. Stay open. Keep listening and watching. Cultivate your love for Christ and let that relationship do its work.
Looking back, thinking of what my mother said, I marvel at the gamble she made. She bet on God. She looked at her daughter, wrestling with these questions, and trusted God that if I kept asking them He would answer in a way I could understand. She leaned on what she knew—perhaps on what I might have scoffed at then as an easy answer—and let the truth be truth and left the rest to Him.
This is the faith I keep hoping to cultivate, the assurance of things not seen.
Day by day.
Samaritan's Song 