Presenting God with the Bill (but taking out my own wallet)

(I wrote this yesterday morning just after I'd posted about Belfast but, for whatever reason, hesitated to post it. Now, for whatever reason, I'm not.)
So (brace yourselves). This (my desk area/ computer) is where I spent most of the day yesterday. I listened to a sermon by Rich Nathan yesterday about the problem of pain (It's not the problem of evil because the problem of evil was defeated on Christ's cross) and suffering. I was going to leave the house (really), but the sermon nailed me to the floor: I've got some issues with suffering. I'm sure I don't need to prove to you that suffering exists. I think my issue, mostly, is with the amount of suffering that is allowed to go on around here (because some lessons, I've found, are only learned through pain).

But, I probably don't need to explain that there is NOT always this nice, neat one-to-one correlation/reap-what-you-sew/touch-fire-get-burned sort of relationship between person and affliction when it comes to suffering (the book of Job is a great piece of protest literature against that, for Job was blameless and upright). My ex-boyfriend's mother died of cancer after an eleven year fight when he was 13. She was (and probably still is) a good Christian woman. One of my dear friends has been in a wheelchair since birth due to Spina Bifida and has health problem upon health problem continually piled on him. He is a devout Christ follower. My own mother suffered through (and survived) cancer. My grandfather recently died (and I don't care HOW old a person is, death is not really ok). Both Christians. I'm from the town home to the Columbine High School shooting that happened ten years ago where several of the 14 (teenaged, and yes there were 14) victims (and 1 teacher) were Christian. And that's not even the extent of my own personal suffering (by now it should be obvious...I'm Christian). Not only that, but it doesn't scratch the surface of humanity's cry of pain.

Darfur is home to the worse humanitarian crisis of the 21st Century. Less than a hundred years ago, Germany was. Millions of Jews (the way I read the Bible, these are GOD'S people!) and millions of others were exterminated for absolutely no reason other than the power, fear and greed of one man. At least 1.2 billion people go to bed hungry every night. 6 million children are currently without clean water (that is, they either have no water or the water they have will kill them). You get it. And it makes it really angry.

God, this is YOUR world. What of it? (Why would You sustain something like this?)

Rich said in his sermon that the most searing attacks of the Christian faith do not come from atheists like Richard Dawkins or Bertrand Russell, but of devout Jewish or Christian BELIEVERS. C.S. Lewis says that the very REASON for your outrage should point to the fact that there is in fact a God who is good, who SHOULD be doing something about this (who you presume CAN or you wouldn't cry for Him) and who you presume cares (or you would take your anguish elsewhere). Yes. Because we all know, somewhere inside us, that pain is not something that "just is" in the sense that it's "ok", really, and those who have "gotten to the place" where they are "ok" with pain are kidding themselves, I'm sorry. Deep down, I have to say that I know that I, that we, as people weren't made for this.

A friend once said, "As you get older, death begins somewhat of a familiar friend." No! my soul cries. No! I can't just "be ok" with death no matter how often it happens around me, how old the person was, or how peacefully they went. (Rich Nathan's got another beautiful sermon on death, too.) I can't just say in my heart to a picture of a starving AIDS orphan that "that's the way life goes" especially when I know of a very few people (proportionally) who are taking disgustingly more than they need at the rest of the world's people's expense. It's not just that my faith forbids that. It's that my very soul is revolted by such psychopathic (really, read the Columbine link) callousness (insensitivity isn't strong enough). I'm mad. I have to care.

God? (A friend and "papa" in my church once said, "If you're not outraged, you're not conscious.")

In the middle of his sermon, Rich talks about suffering being a "stepping" stone - not a "stumbling" stone for faith. He read an e-mail he received from a firefighter: "I often find that God is working in the fire. God is working in the rubble. And I find that He is working through me." Whoa hey. Like the book "The Wounded Woman" (though the ideas and principles really could be applied to everyone) I'm reading says, "Your pain is not a problem. It is a solution." (And here, I am reminded of a line from a Rich Mullins song that caught in my head about 6 years ago on a drive with my father through Utah after a college visit trip down the West Coast. I was not Christian then - actually, I was still convinced that I was "never going to be" - but this line has been swinging around the branches of my mind ever since that trip: "You meet the Lord in the furnace long time 'fore you meet Him in the sky.")

And my pastor has recently been mining the riches - for they truly riches in a sin-soaked planet - of Christ's suffering, too. Guys, Jesus gets it. We don't have a High Priest who snaps His whip saying "deal with it" when it comes to bloodshed, or cancer, or ravaged lands, or nakedness, or starvation, or loneliness or depression ("My Soul is troubled to the point of death!"). Only we who are Christian have a God who suffered, too. This valley of the shadow of death that we walk through? Our God died, too. This atrocious, bone cracking hell-on-earth we flounder in? Christ fell (three times) under His cross, too. We want this suffering to stop, to be taken from us? God-in-Christ asked God-the-Father (three times) for the horrific-ness He was about to endure to pass before Him, too.

God does not answer the "why" Job hurl at Him 17 times throughout the book (like Eugene Peterson paraphrases in The Message version of the Bible, "You are asking the wrong question. There is no cause-and-effect relationship. Look for what God can do."), but He promised us He would never leave us. Not even to the end of the age. (So, in theory, we don't even need to pray "Come, Holy Spirit" because She already has...).

And that, to me, is no longer an airy-fairy promise of hand-holding because Christ knows what it is to suffocate, to bleed to death, and to be mocked in the process. That is the God who knows me, who sees me, who's planned for me since before my mother's womb, and who walks with me and who will walk with you.

It really IS "time I started dancing over all these graves!"
(how can I sing this?)
It is really IS time "I give you o my God the highest Praise"
(because "I want the joy of the Lord to come down,
to fall down, to lift me,
to change me!
I want the joy of the Lord - the freedom of the Lord - the LOVE of the Lord
in my life!").