The ugly truth of choosing hope

When I struggle to believe that God is good

Yesterday, we sat on the floor with our comatose dog in our arms as an IV dripped electrolytes back into his system. Almost exactly 3 years ago, we sat on the same floor in the same vet practice as we held my husband’s sweet family dog through his last moments of life.

To hold another limp dog in our arms – even though this one is only 9 months old and has (hopefully) a long life ahead of him – was gut-wrenching. It brought back memories that neither of us cared to re-live. It plunged us into a cocktail of old grief and new.

Humphrey went in for CT scans and blood draws yesterday in hopes of getting to the bottom of this pain he’s experiencing, and like a fool, I thought we’d get some of the scan results on the same day. But I’ve been through enough medical procedures to know that that isn’t how it works. Scans have to be sent off and analysed. So now, we wait.

The waiting is agony: not knowing if we’ll finally receive answers or if we have to carry on living in limbo, managing the unmanageable with no hope for reprieve.

In these moments, I feel the weight of Holy Saturday: that day between loss and redemption when the disciples questioned whether everything they’d put their faith in was worth it. Is hope really stronger than the doubt that comes with grief? I ask this every morning when I get out of bed and pull myself downstairs to face another day with a sick puppy.

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I remember sitting at the bar with a friend on a weekday afternoon back when I was still a student, and somehow we got on the subject of God. I’d learned early on not to bring up my faith unless the conversation naturally evolved that way – for the culture in which I was raised, one of American frankness and spirituality, could not be more different from the reserved and secular British culture in which I now live.

In my first 5 years of living in England, 95% of my friendship group was comprised of atheists. I didn’t have an active church community in any sense of the word, and so I maintained a relationship with God in isolation. (I now fully understand why God designed us for community. Without it, life is lonely. It’s hard. Doubt creeps in faster when you have no one to hold you up in the darkness.)

On this particular day, one of my many brilliant and atheistic friends broached the subject that I have wrestled with almost every day of my life: how can I believe in a good God in the face of such an evil world? How can I live in a world where I see the atrocities that take place and still claim that God is Love?

Sometimes, friend, I really don’t know.

The simple answer, which I believe to be valid but also understandably “not good enough” for my atheist friends who haven’t yet met the Holy Spirit, is that with freedom comes evil. If God dignifies our freedom so much that He watches in horror as we lie and steal and kill one another, I can only conclude that my freedom matters very much to Him indeed. With that freedom, I have just as much power to evoke beauty and light and good into this world as I have to evoke darkness and horror. God, in His goodness, dignifies us with a choice. Every day. And sometimes, we choose wrong.

Never am I more plagued by the weight of “choice” than when living in my Holy Saturdays. The waiting between grief and hope truly is agony. It’s the perfect opportunity to entertain every “what-if,” every doubt, every ounce of anger and bitterness and fear. So often, in the waiting, I do not choose to see God as good for precisely the reason that my friend chooses not to believe in Him at all: this world seems far too broken. Bad things happen to good people. Babies die. Saints face fatal illnesses. Wars destroy countries. Diseases wipe out generations. And so when I am reminded of that familiar verse in Romans 8, “all things work together for the good of those who love Him, who are called according to His purpose,” I think “whose definition of ‘good’ are we talking about here?”

Was it “good” for each of my friends (for I sadly have more than one) who lost a baby? Is it “good” that my old kindergarten teacher, a beautiful woman of God, was diagnosed with cancer at such a young age? Is it “good” that I’ve been living with chronic pain since I was 17 or that my dog was born with illness or that my dad was raised in a perfect breeding ground to foster addiction? These are people who love God – where is the “good” for which all things have worked together in their lives?

The only thread that I can hold onto in answer to this haunting question is the redemption of Jesus, the promise of eternity, the weight of glory that comes with being loved by the Maker of all things. I can only believe that the God of the universe bears far more power to redeem our evil than our evil bears in wiping out the notion of His goodness. I see it in glimpses in my own life – His desire to redeem that which I have lost on a wedding day, in a house purchase, in conversations with friends who find help with mental illness after hearing my own testimony.

Redemption, friends, is stunning. It’s dazzling. Blindingly so. Sometimes, I find Jesus all the more beautiful for being who he is in spite of such evil. For using HIS freedom to give himself up on that cross in service to people who spat on him and beat him and nailed his wrists down. Perfect love is nothing apart from this.

And yet, I’d be lying if I said I’d rather have the beautiful, complicated redemption story over the simple, light, easy one. God is so good for comforting my friends who have lost their babies, but I’d rather those babies have simply lived. God is good for healing my teacher with cancer, but I’d rather she’d never had to go through chemo in the first place. Has their faith, perhaps, grown stronger under the pressure of sorrow? I am certain of it. But I still can’t understand why we, the beautiful, intelligent, capable human race, can’t simply pursue God with reckless abandon from a state of ease, peace, and joy? Why must we live in these narratives of hardship to see how faithful He is? Why must we know the depths of darkness before appreciating His dazzling light? Are we so blind and stubborn that we do not appreciate Jesus in times of simplicity and happiness? I’ve spent the last few months in the Old Testament, and its documentation of human nature would indeed imply that we are so blind. And shame on us.

I am tired of it.

And I am not afraid to say it: I dare to dream of an easy life where my loved ones are healthy and nothing bad happens AND we love the Lord our God and worship Him forever. I am tired of my worship becoming more potent in the acuteness of pain. I want to worship and delight in glory AND know a season of ease. Some have said that this makes me weak, idealistic, even unrealistic (and yeah, I know it does), but I consistently refuse to accept anything less than a progressive move in the direction of “On earth as it is in Heaven.” Give me Heaven. Give me bliss. Give me the glory of God. Give me Revelation 21:4. I want it now. I’m tired of worshipping with searing pain in my back and a sick dog at my feet. I want to worship as all of my loved ones have their hands raised up, in full health, on either side of me, with no pain in their lives, singing “Glory, glory, glory to God Almighty.”

I struggle, truly, to understand why this tension between sorrow and worship, between doubt and hope, continues through each thread of humanity and divinity. Is my freedom really so precious to God that Jesus had to die such a heinous death? Was Good Friday really that Good if this is what humanity’s choices resulted in? For the redemption it brought about, it was good to be sure. But for the fact it ever had to happen at all? I cannot let go of my idealistic, romantic notion that the human story should never have reached such a desperate need for our Lord to die this way. Why couldn’t we do better? Why couldn’t the world be better? Dammit, why is my innocent dog so sick and my husband and I are sitting on this floor choking back tears?

I resent the less-than-perfect world I live in, even as I see how it comes part and parcel with my freedom and my dignity and my ability to choose. Even as I see the beauty of redemption and hold onto the notion that God’s love for us truly will be the victor over this war in the very end.

As I live in the Holy Saturday of waiting, and I sit with the weight of my freedom – freedom to trust Him no matter the outcome or freedom to question Him once again – I can only fall on my knees, staring at the rainbow He placed outside our house last night, and ask for the help of the Holy Spirit. I can’t choose hope – not on my own. My questions and my doubt and even my intellect prevent me from doing so. If my freedom truly is that precious to Him, I’d certainly like to offer it back up with faith and hope and certainty that whether my dog lives or dies, whether my friends ever bring a baby into this world, whether my pain continues or ceases, the very act of Christ crucified is enough to still say “It is well.”

All my love,