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.

Former evangelist turned atheist Charles Templeton heard the story similarly, but thoroughly detested the idea that the tormented Job is an answer to anything at all. Templeton held that the story of Job reveled God as a “cruel and callous despot” and for him the story was anything but an answer to suffering.(2) His anger is often pointed at the seeming attempt to speak into pain and suffering at all, to make sense of that which often cannot be explained, and to bring God into it in a way that is meant to trump the cry for answers: “[The story of Job] is an immoral story and it portrays an immoral God.”(3)

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Non-Answers and Hope →

I find it difficult to cry in front of people, and I’m not even sure why.(1) Even when I want to cry, I can’t. Behind closed doors I dissolve into a fountain of expression. But as I listened to Anna’s story, mutinous tears escapes my eyes, and I made no effort to wipe them away. I ached inside for this woman who had suffered one of the greatest kinds of loss in life. How was she still so graciously soft instead of hardened with bitterness?

She was his mother. She had carried him inside of her for nine months. She had felt the exhilaration of her child’s arrival into the world. She had held him, fed him, protected him, dreamed for him, cherished him. She would have given her very life for him.

As she held Jonathan’s tiny body in her arms sobs spilled from the depths of her soul. She carried him into the living room and looked desperately at her husband, pleading for him to fix what she knew could not be restored. Wordlessly, her husband gently took Jonathan from her arms. He looked at his son’s face, a face that resembled his own. He kissed the top of his head and then slowly, slowly raised his arms to lift the baby up to the heavens. Tears streamed down his face as he lifted his eyes upward in an act of submission to a fate that broke his heart.

Anna cried out in protest. No, no, no! She was not ready to give him back to God. He was an extension of her heart. She was not ready to part with him, not ready to accept what had been tragically forced on her.

For some time, she couldn’t bear to visit his grave. But in a sense, she visited it every day. There may have been a site where marble was engraved for everyone else to see, but his life and death were engraved on her heart. In that way, he stayed with her.

People tried to comfort her, but there is no comfort for such a loss. In an effort to console her, they said, “You’re young. You’ll have other children.” Perhaps, but she needed to grieve the loss of this child.

Over the years, Anna brought three more children into the world, but her family did not go to South America as missionaries as they planned. The call to South American had included Jonathan, and the idea of going without him brought with it enormous pain that was too much to bear. Twenty years passed before she returned to that calling and began to carefully unwrap it again. I want to believe that God understood this. Somehow, for me, it would seem to uphold the integrity of grief.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Sharing Grief →