Getting good with God

“Are you mad at God?”

My answer started with about a minute of silence. I hadn’t thought of that before until a pastor friend asked me one morning.

During that minute, I thought back to some of the difficult things I’d been through in my Lyme disease battle.

I’d lost my health, my marriage, and my ability to work. I’d had to move three hours away from my son and my friends to live with my parents because I wasn’t able to take care of myself. I had become disabled and lost my ability to do a bunch of things I loved to do. And I’d lost an awful lot of money as well.

“Yes,” I said. “I think I am mad at God.”

I suspect a lot of people who have struggled with Lyme and co-infections would answer the same way.

If you believe in God, then you probably believe that God could have spared you from all the misery you’ve experienced. And if you are a praying person, you’ve probably asked Him why.

I’m not the type who shakes his fist at the sky or anywhere else for that matter, so I’ve had to work through the problem in other ways.

The book of Job in the Bible is perhaps the only place where God clearly deals with the question of why bad things happen to people for no apparent reason. Job was singled out as one of God’s all-time favorites, a man beyond reproach, but he gets pelted with horror after horror. His wife advised him to “curse God and die.”

Job didn’t do that, but he did complain about God. Then, at the end of the book, God appears and has His say.

He starts a lengthy discourse by saying, “Where were you Job when I laid the foundations of the earth?” By the time He finishes speaking, His point is clear. He is so far above us that we cannot possibly understand His ways. If it had been the 21st century, He might have said, “Job, you’re just not wired to understand this.”

I believe that Job’s reply is also crucial for anyone trying to come to grips with terrible things that have happened to them. He starts by saying, “Behold, I am of little importance,” and shortly afterward adds, “I have uttered that which I don’t understand.”

The first point is that Job, like us, is only a human being. There’s a cliche that we are the clay and God is the potter, but I think it’s true. I believe that human beings have tremendous value, but in the overall scheme of things, it’s not all about us.

His second point is accepting God’s point about him not understanding. This, I feel, is the biggest key to working through anger toward the Almighty.

If you accept the scriptural view that God’s ways are so far above ours that we can’t possibly comprehend them, then you can say to yourself that there was a reason you went through this hell, although you may never know what it is.

I know a guy who lost his wife to cancer at a young age. She had two small children when diagnosed, and she went through agony hanging on to life long enough to be there for her kids as long as possible. After watching that play out year after year, he became bitter toward God and lost interest in the Christian life.

It seems to me that he’s giving up a lot. I can see things more objectively when I’m looking at it through the lens of another person’s experience rather than mine. My faith and my relationship with God are two of the most important parts of my life. They are things that I want to keep, no matter what.

So am I still mad at God? I don’t think so, but I can’t say for sure. I’ve worked through this to some degree, but it’s difficult to know how I feel in the depths of my being. Still, like Job, I can now honestly say I understand and accept that there are some things that I’ll never be able to understand; and that’s okay.

Photo: Eric Davidson