According to Will Durant, “The greatest question of our time is not communism vs. individualism, not Europe vs. America, not even the East vs. the West; it is whether men can bear to live without God.” The importance of this question impacts us all because it is not simply an intellectual exercise, but a question of life. If God indeed exists, then it would change everything. The consequences would be major, and to ignore God, to avoid God, or to reject God could be costly. But can we really know that God is real?

As it is often framed, such a question means that we are asking for overwhelming evidence or evidence of a particular nature before we feel we can make a judgment. We may insist that if God were real God would reveal himself on our terms, whether through science, or the arts, or philosophy. Yet my response would be that we should defer judgment, hold back our prejudices and our desired terms, and follow the trail of intimations to where they may lead. Let me lay some foundations.

Since the beginning of time until the present, the overwhelming majority of people have believed that God exists. This is not a compelling argument, but it is nonetheless an occurrence that demands explanation. What’s more, many scientists and philosophers continue to see overwhelming evidence of design in the natural world. The complexity, order, and life-sustaining factors are too significant to be answered by chance. If you watched a movie and were clearly awed by it, but were then told that it just came together by chance, you would scoff at the suggestion! The beauty, the plot, the detail, and the coherence tell you plainly that an intelligent agent was involved. As the old song says, “Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could.”

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In August of 1963, due to his ailing health and increasing responsibilities, C.S. Lewis announced his retirement from Cambridge. His stepson Douglas Gresham and friend Walter Hooper were sent to the university to sort out his affairs and bring home the two thousand or so books that lined the walls of his Magdalene College office. Knowing the house was already filled to its bursting point with books, the pair wondered all the way home where on earth they would find the space to put them. But Lewis had already contrived an intricate plan for their use.

A nurse named Alec had been hired to stay up nights in case Lewis fell ill and needed his assistance. As the men returned with the enormous load of books, Alec was asleep in his room on the ground floor. As the truck pulled into the driveway, Lewis appeared, cautioning them to silence. “Where’ll we store the books?” Hooper whispered, to which Lewis responded with a wink. Carrying each stack with tedious concern so as not to wake the sleeping victim, the three men piled the works around the nurse’s bed, sealing him in a cocoon of manuscript and literature. When they were finished, the books were stacked nearly to the ceiling, filling every square inch of the room where the snoring nurse still slept.

Much to the relief of the anxious culprits who were waiting outside, Alex finally awoke. From within the insulated tomb, first came sounds of bellowing, and finally the tumbling of the great literary wall. An amused nurse emerged from within the wreckage.

The characters in this story are every bit as spirited as some of the playful personalities from Lewis’s imaginary worlds. These are the whimsical scenes—fiction and non-fiction—that seal in my mind the many weighty lessons I have wrought from him. But perhaps namely: Christianity is a religion with room—and reason—for life and laughter.

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It was a scene made for good people-watching. Jesus sat down opposite the place where the offerings were placed and watched the crowd putting their money into the temple treasury.(1) There were some who made a spectacle of their giving. Others gave in guilt or joy or obligation. Many rich people threw in large amounts. A poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins, worth only a fraction of a penny. The motives of giving are as many as the people who give.

In a Wall Street Journal article titled “Charitable Explanation,” Arthur Brooks examined giving in the United States and its patterns through storm and season. In the month of December, for instance, as much as a third of the quarter-trillion dollars Americans give away each year is collected. Eighty-five million Americans participate.

Even so, giving is not a collective national trait. “While 85 million American households give away money each year to nonprofit organizations,” notes Brooks “another 30 million do not.”(2) There is a Giving America and Non-Giving America, he says. And what distinguishes them is not income. In fact, he reports, “America’s working poor give away at least as large a percentage of their incomes as the rich, and a lot more than the middle class. The charity gap is driven not by economics but by values.” Giving is apparently a matter of perspective, and this is true from America to Australia to Asia.

In the middle of his people-watching at the temple treasury, Jesus called his disciples to the scene in front him: a widow had dropped in two copper coins as she passed by the treasury, and it caught the eye of the teacher. Sandwiched between the generous gifts of the affluent, her coins would perhaps not have drawn the attention of anyone else. But Jesus said, “I tell you the truth, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything—all she had to live on.” (3)

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Some years ago, we were spending Christmas in the home of my wife’s parents. It was not a happy day in the household. Much had gone wrong during the preceding weeks, and a weight of sadness hung over the home. Yet, in the midst of all that, my mother-in-law kept her routine habit of asking people who would likely have no place to go at Christmas to share Christmas dinner with us.

That year she invited a man who was, by everyone’s estimate, somewhat of an odd person, quite eccentric in his demeanor. Not much was known about him at the church except that he came regularly, sat alone, and left without much conversation. He obviously lived alone and was quite a sorry-looking, solitary figure. He was our Christmas guest.

Because of other happenings in the house (not the least of which was that one daughter was taken to the hospital for the birth of her first child), everything was in confusion. All of our emotions were on edge. It fell upon me, in turn, to entertain this gentleman. I must confess that I did not appreciate it. Owing to a heavy life of travel year-round, I have jealously guarded my Christmases as time to be with my family. This was not going to be such a privilege, and I was not happy. As I sat in the living room, entertaining him while others were busy, I thought to myself, “This is going to go down as one of the most miserable Christmases of my life.”

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I used to be a faithful listener to the national news. But it seems that more and more news reporting delivers more and more bad news. Not wanting to begin each day already down in the dumps, I’ve become more of a sporadic listener. Of course, I recognize that this is not a recent trend. Most news has rarely, if ever, been uplifting. The events deemed “newsworthy” are generally traumatic or catastrophic events. Since there are more than enough examples of ‘bad news’ each day those ‘good’ newsworthy items rarely get reported.

These “bad news” stories are even more difficult to deal with because they are not simply news stories affecting someone else; they are real stories of the everyday realities of people all around me, and including me. Close friends have loved ones in global conflict zones. Colleagues struggle to make ends meet, or are coping with their own traumatic events and struggles. For many, their own lives comprise the “bad news” stories of struggling to survive in extraordinarily dark times.

Trouble is part of every human experience, and every human will experience days of “bad news.” No one is immune. Even the greatest of leaders in the ancient world did not escape trouble and despair. Those who might critique religious faith as a flight from reality or an escape from trouble might be surprised to see the exact opposite detailed in the pages of the bible. Even those who claimed direct experience of God, did not escape the hard realities of life in this world.

Described as a “man after God’s own heart,” David, the great king of Israel, experienced many difficulties throughout his life just as he was the recipient of bad news. And when he experienced trouble, he turned to poetry. Psalm 18, as one example, appears to have been a poem written after the experience of deliverance from national enemies and the current king of Israel, King Saul.

The poetry composed by David expresses his grief and distress in the midst his trials. The imagery he uses is of a near death experience: “The waves of death encompassed me; the torrents of destruction overwhelmed me; the cords of Sheol surrounded me; the snares of death confronted me. In my distress I called upon the Lord.”(1)  His distress felt like drowning; being swallowed up by the mighty waves of the sea.

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I have always loved that theologian David Wells refers to prayer as “rebelling against the status quo.”(1) No doubt the feisty among us have eyes that light up at the thought. To rebel against the status quo in this light is to challenge life where it has resigned itself to something less, to bring about rebirth and reformation where life or faith have grown stale.

Others may wonder what Christianity, and specifically Christian prayer, has to do with rebellion at all. The candid lyrics of a haunting song speak of Jesus Christ as a man of love and strength, but a man very much separated from everything we see and experience today. The lyrics sing of his living only inside our prayers, and come to the conclusion that while what Christ was may have indeed been beautiful, a man of the past can offer nothing at all for the here and now of real and wearying pain. The sentiment reflects a sorely honest philosophy that many have of the world today: It is what it is. And it won’t change anything to worry about it. Prayer, within such an imagination, is useless. The here and now of suffering is untouchable.

From headline to headline we find the weariness of life and the problem of a dark world screaming at us. Many have grown to see it as an unchangeable reality. But if we have come to terms with the world as it is, it is only because we have come to refuse thinking about how it could be, or how it was supposed to be, or how we could even have an idea that something is wrong in the first place. It is not that we are unconscious of the injustice, suffering, and even evil around us, but that we feel utterly powerless to do anything about it. Still others among us optimistically call for the abolishing of poverty or the end of trafficking or the stopping of whatever cause they are presently championing. While their efforts are needed, the end they call for doesn’t seem to ever occur.

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I remember the time when my son had to go through a very simple surgery when he was just five years old. He was not able to breathe properly, so the doctors had to remove some extra tissue surrounding his nostril and nasal passages. During the hours and days after his surgery, my once-a-chatterbox son had become completely quiet. Because of the fear of being hurt if he spoke, he quit using words for his way of communication. It was overwhelming to see my boy struggling to express himself in that condition.

As I assisted my son get back to talking, I could not help but think of how unexpectedly Zechariah lost his speech after he questioned the angel who brought him such good news about a long-waited child in his old age.(1) In Zechariah’s case, the temporary loss of words was something of an acknowledgement of the promised child he doubted, a child who would prepare the way for the Messiah. Though he knew why he was made silent, I am sure he felt restless until he held his son in his arms and was finally able to describe his emotions properly.

There are spiritual retreat centers in various locations around the world, which offer “Silent Weeks” to those who are over-exhausted from excessive communication. During these weeks, individuals are banned from verbal communication in order to quiet themselves internally. The goal is simply to bring back the core purpose of real interaction: tending to what is being said in reality.

When the words are taken from us either because of the inability to speak or the lack of verbal direction, we become strangely poor, almost incomplete. There are two sides of this poverty: one is internal, losing the comfort of one’s capability to express oneself fully. The other is external, as one finds no real guidance to turn to for wisdom. In my opinion, the latter has eternal ramifications if not satisfied in a timely manner.

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Someone told me recently that he wondered if humans only truly ever pray when we are in the midst of despair. Maybe only when we have no other excuses to offer, no other comfort to hide behind, no more façades to uphold, are we most likely to bow in exhaustion and be real with God and ourselves. C.S. Lewis might have wondered similarly: “For most of us, the prayer in Gethsemane is the only model.” In our distress, in our lament, we stand as we truly are: creatures in need hope and mercy, in need of someone to listen.

The words within the ancient Hebrew story of Jonah that are of most interest to me are words that in some ways seem not to fit in the story at all.(1) Interrupting a narrative that quickly draws in its hearers, a narrative about Jonah, the text very fleetingly pauses to bring us the voice of Jonah himself before returning again to the narrative. The eight lines come in the form of a distraught and despairing, though poetic prayer. The poem could be omitted without affecting the coherence of the story whatsoever. And yet, the deliberate jaunt in the narrative text provides a moment of significant commentary to the whole. The eight verses of poetry not only mark an abrupt shift in the tone of the text, but also in the attitude of its main character. The poetic prayer of the prophet, spoken as a cry of deliverance, arise from the belly of the great fish—a stirring image reminiscent of another despairing soul’s question: “Where can I flee from your presence?” cried David. “If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me.”(2)

Jonah’s eloquent prayer for deliverance stands out in a book that is detailed with his egotistic mantras and glaring self-deceptions. By his own actions, Jonah finds himself in darkness, and yet it is in the dark that he finally speaks most honestly to God. The story is vaguely familiar to many hearers, and yet our familiarity often seems to minimize the distress that broke Jonah’s silence with God. The popular notion that Jonah went straight from the side of the ship into the mouth of the fish is not supported by either the narrative as a whole or Jonah’s prayer. As one scholar suggests, “[Jonah] was half drowned before he was swallowed. If he was still conscious, sheer dread would have caused him to faint—notice that there is no mention of the fish in his prayer. He can hardly have known what caused the change from wet darkness to an even greater dry darkness. When he did regain consciousness, it would have taken some time to realize that the all-enveloping darkness was not that of Sheol but of a mysterious safety.”(3)

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Not much is known about the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus who lived in ancient Ephesus approximately five hundred years before Jesus was born. What is known about him is his belief that the fundamental essence of the universe is change. The source of change, Heraclitus believed, was that fire was the central element of the universe; fire alters everything continuously and as a result nothing is fixed or permanent in the world. The aphorism “No one steps in the same river twice” gives a concise image for his philosophical views.(1) Perhaps it might not surprise the modern reader of Heraclitus to learn that those who wrote about him characterized him as the “weeping philosopher.” His contemporaries noted that he suffered such bouts with melancholy that he couldn’t finish many of his philosophical writings.(2)

While a direct intellectual link cannot be drawn from Heraclitus to the Buddha, the belief that everything is changing is also a central part of Buddhist teachings. There is no underlying substance that is not subject to the impermanent nature of existence. Instead, everything is in flux.(3) The doctrine of impermanence or anicca, applies even to human nature. Simple observation shows that the human body, for example, develops and changes from infancy to adulthood and into old age—continually changing. All living beings change as cells develop, die, and then are replaced by new cells. On a cognitive level, most humans have had the experience of fleeting mental events, or have thoughts come and go dissolving into memories that cannot easily be accessed. And all know how time seems to slip through our fingers: the future becomes the present, which becomes the past. As Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan penned over fifty years ago, “The order is rapidly fadin’ and the first one now will later be last for the times they are a-changin’.”(4)

Friedrich Nietzsche drew upon both of these traditions as he looked out onto what he considered to be a crumbling foundation of Judeo-Christianity—a foundation taken down in part by continual change. He wrote:

“The eternal and exclusive process of becoming, the utter evanescence of everything real, which keeps      acting and evolving but never is, as Heraclitus teaches us, is a terrible and stunning notion. Its impact is most closely related to the feeling of an earthquake, which makes people relinquish their faith that the earth is firmly grounded. It takes astonishing strength to transpose this reaction into its opposite, into sublime and happy astonishment.”(5)

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If you want to investigate whether Sherlock Holmes was a real or fictional person, you can’t believe everything you read on the Internet. His “biography” is as easy to find as Winston Churchill’s (and there seems to be some fact/fiction confusion on both counts).(1) Between the years of 1887 and 1927, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote prolifically of the famous detective known for his heightened skills of observation and eccentric personality. Holmes was both memorable and beloved—and entirely fictional. It is a strange irony indeed that there are a great number of people who would claim the clues suggest otherwise. As Holmes himself once said, “The temptation to form premature theories upon insufficient data is the bane of our profession.”

The process of gathering and interpreting information is never ending. From childhood we learn patterns of life around us and create theories on how it all works and how we must live. Not knowing whether it is insufficient data or fast truth, children readily form theories. For instance: pans on the stove burn fingers. This is one theory a child might conclude having learned the hard way. But as data becomes more sufficient, a child’s theories are readily adjusted—namely, certain parts of a pan on a hot stove burn fingers. Though memory of the sting may last, there seems an unconscious acknowledgment that their theories are the means to understanding and relating to the world. This is very different then theorizing the end they might want, need, or hope to be true.

Strangely, the temptation Sherlock Holmes describes—forming theories upon insufficient data—seems to grow with age. As the questions we seek answers for become more difficult, so the ante for interpreting accurately increases as we grow older. And yet, as adults we are often less willing to adjust our theories. The biases we bring into investigating often prevent us from recognizing data as insufficient or even faulty. We also more readily remember the sting of being burned and hold onto it in our interpretation, so that even for some of life’s deepest questions we are responding with predisposed theories. For instance, God cannot exist because if God did exist my mother wouldn’t have died so young, or tsunamis and hurricanes wouldn’t kill people, or I wouldn’t still be struggling with my finances. But how would we respond to a child who insisted that if broccoli were good for her, it would taste like candy?

In one of his essays, F.W. Boreham writes of his grade school difficulties with geography class. When the teacher spoke of life in a far-off land, he found himself drifting off to scenes in that land and remaining there long after they had switched to another destination. One day, catching him in the midst of a daydream, the teacher called on Boreham and asked, “What part of the world are we studying?” Recognizing a fellow student in distress, a friend scribbled the correct rejoinder on the paper beside them. “Java is the answer,” said Boreham. “Good,” the teacher noted, “Now tell me, what was the question?”

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In the fifteen seasons of the television series ER, there is one scene for me that uncomfortably stands out among the many. In a hospital bed rests a former prison doctor named Truman, ridden with cancer and laden with guilt. Julia, the ER chaplain, sits beside him, trying with great compassion to listen, and being slower to give answers than he’d like. One of Truman’s roles as a prison doctor was to administer lethal injections to those who were sentenced to die. With great torment, he remembers one man in particular who did not die after the injection and needed to be given a second round. Looking back, Truman believes it was a sign from God, a sign which he ignored and would never be able to undo; the man he injected was later found to have been innocent, framed for the crime for which he was killed.

Now desperate for answers—blunt and solid answers—Truman reels at Julia for the uncertain comforts she attempts to offer. “I need answers, and all your questions and your uncertainty are only making things worse!” he yells. But in his last, livid outburst he is even more honest: “I need someone who will look me in the eye and tell me how to find forgiveness, because I am running out of time.”(1)

The problem of injustice and the difficulty of forgiveness are specters often met with cries for answers. Christians who attempt to respond at all often invoke the story of Job, for in it, the questions of injustice reel like Truman in his hospital bed, and unexpected answers from God counter in a way we never fathomed. The story begins with an accusation that Job only serves God because God has allowed him to prosper. To prove Job’s accuser wrong, God steps back, removing divine protection and leaving the tempter to his destructive game. Job loses everything; he writhes in his own anguish, confusion, and ashes. In the end, he remains in his belief of God, though limping with his weighted questions, and he encounters God without pretense.

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There are those who say that lukewarm acceptance is more bewildering than outright rejection. I always wonder if they have ever heard the story of the Syrophoenician woman.

Jesus was on his way to a place where no one would recognize him. From the chaos of Jerusalem and the crowds of Galilee he withdrew to the region of Tyre. According to one of his disciples, when he had entered a house, he wanted no one to know of it. Yet, he did not escape notice. A Gentile woman of the Syrophoenician race immediately fell at his feet and began to cry out, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is cruelly demon-possessed.” But he did not answer her a word.(1)

In the lives of those who believe in God, rejection is always a distinct possibility. Of course, this is not to say that God is rejecting us personally. As Jesus said, “All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away.”  And yet, in the barren silence after years of praying for a child, in the slamming of a door that held a real and certain hope, in the wordless dismissal of a mother brought to her knees, the rejection is indeed personal.

But this woman at Jesus’s feet refused to turn away at the first sign of his refusal. She was not deterred by the disciples’ request that she be sent away, nor was she convinced to cease her plea after the harsh words that finally did break Jesus’s silence:  “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Being a Gentile, she was not one of them. Lesser rejections have certainly brought me to crumbled mess. Yet even this was not a thought that would dissuade her. Bowing down before him, she pled once more, “Lord, help me!”

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Dutch painter Jan Vermeer is remembered as a master of light and color. Long before his contemporaries, Vermeer was painting light, seeing not the object he was painting but the light that brought it to life. Yet like many of his contemporaries he died poor, without distinction, and without the slightest intimation of the reputation he would come to bear. He died young, leaving his wife and eleven children in financial ruin and the majority of his art claimed by creditors. Two hundred years, his paintings gained recognition and Vermeer became known as one of Holland’s greatest painters.

There seems to run a common thread through many of the artists, musicians, and writers that history has come to recognize as its most influential: they never lived to see their own influence. Countless lives now celebrated, once lived in need and died in obscurity. Only one of Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings sold while he was yet living. William Blake, one of England’s great figures of art and literature, dwelled in near poverty and died unrecognized. Emily Dickinson’s talent was unmatched in its day, and yet she lived a life unknown and undiscovered. Only seven of her poems were published in her lifetime, all of which were altered by her publishers to match the style and form of the time.

There are many reputations that will die with the person to which they once belonged. There are many others who seem to be birthed posthumously, lives discovered in death, yet forever leaving a mark on humanity. To those of us living, it seems somehow unfair. They never lived to see how deeply their presence was felt. Their life’s significance was birthed only after their death.

The writers of Scripture seem to describe the lives of those who follow Christ in a similarly seemingly tragic way. They remind us without apology that humanity passes through its days like evening shadows and withers away like grass. And they claim paradoxically that somehow to die is gain and that in death is new life. To those who die with Christ, even what is withered will be raised–a promise both real in life and profoundly true in death. “Don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” asks the apostle Paul. “We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.”(1) In the words of Emily Dickinson, to some a death-blow is mysteriously and thoroughly a life-blow.

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