An essay to answer Patty, @TheVictoryTour, Twitter

The question of questions. I fired broadcast news 2 1/2 years ago because I could no longer manage the result of the stress of these reports and images blaring at me. How can we possibly avoid despair unless we steel ourselves to the facts? There is more than enough food for all, so why do those in need not get it? During the Ethiopian famine, there were reports of food sitting where it was unloaded and not getting to people because of government officials/policies/incompetence/whatever. If this is true, we are our own worst enemy.

Back when Martha Stewart was going through her trials and tribulations, my young son and I were in line at the grocery store, where a tabloid featured a photo and caption of Stewart on the cover.  Back in the car, as we buckled our seat belts, my son said,

“I’m really worried about Martha Stewart.  She looks so awfully stressed.” As he agonized over the plight of Martha Stewart, I did my best to comfort him, but what I was working with was the same boy who saw Stewart in her garden on TV and was upset that she was out there working in it “all alone.” Trying to get a highly sensitive kid like this to adulthood with any semblance of mental health with a mother who is a life-long hand-wringer, herself?  Should I throw in his and his sister’s chronically-ill lives on top of that?  A case of post-traumatic stress? A mother who found herself on the other side of what I call “The Dark Years,” a period of 6-7-8 years of injury, illness, conflict, death of a loved one and living in fear that I was losing my mind?

Should I mention the church? Back then, I was an evangelical, and although my “church family” cared about me, let’s just say that their efforts, well-meaning or not, were largely unhelpful. I quit church. It only added to my pain to have to talk to these folks. This was followed by phone calls, in which one woman recited to me a list of the sins she committed when she “ran away from God.”

“I’m not running from God,” I told her. “I’m running from you people.”

All this to say that I have been cornered with some grim stuff and that’s just what was going on in my home, never mind the rest of the world.  Add to this the reality of history and all of the sins mankind has committed against itself, before Jesus Christ and after him. Jesus, inserted into history to make a difference, followed by people who destroy one another in his name.  Centuries before the Protestant Reformation let loose senseless killing from both sides and plenty of it, earlier Christians had a jump on the violence in the Crusades, which ended up boiling down to power and wealth.

During my Dark Years, my faith had only the slightest pulse. The death of my loved one was unexpected and in a way, destroyed me. I simply could not go a step further with God. I was angry I’d been abandoned.  I’d been given some pretty major blessings, or, one, anyway, in that I’d been told I would never have children of my own followed by the birth of a daughter 14 months later.  This only added to my sense of guilt as I cold-shouldered God. I could not make any sense of what was happening, none, and to try to figure God into all of this pain? The only thing I could come up with was that he was the author of it.  I remember saying,

“I know you are there, but…” in other words…don’t come any closer. I’d been following God, I thought, and my life still came to a place of ruin, on many levels. I ended up moving hundreds of miles away to the wilds of northern New York in a little place a mile from a main road where I watched the deer and sunsets for a year. Eventually and slowly, I learned that life was about more than loss and that I didn’t have to necessarily pick up all of the pieces. I lost some.

God is not  a vending machine. God rearranging events to make my life easier wasn’t going to necessarily make it better.  He could snap his fingers and turn the sky into roses, but…I would never have to grow.

I liken this to doing everything for my children. Everything.  Let’s say I do their assignments, even.  I think you see where I am going, here.  My son was rattled when he was always coming home with complaints and tales of “teacher troubles.”  Eventually I sat down and looked him dead in the eye.

“Listen. I love you. No one on this earth loves you more than I do. I, however, am not going to protect you from teachers and what they require of you.” I felt so incredibly mean in that very long moment where his breath caught and he wiped tears from his eyes, took a deep breath and answered,

“Okay.”

The kid needed to learn to follow direction. No matter how much your mama loves you, the fact remains that life is full of challenges and what we think is fair doesn’t exist WITHOUT CONSTANT INTERVENTION ON THE PART OF SOMEONE FORCING OTHERS to BEHAVE THEMSELVES. We live in a world where some people are okay with bullying, abuse and even enslavement and torture of others. Those of us that can have to stand up to this evil on behalf of the ones who can’t. God could be the big, divine, shiny behavior police in the sky, but…what would the world be like without free will?  Rather meaningless, I’d say.  We wouldn’t care about God of our own volition, which God values most of all, and we wouldn’t have to care about much of anything else.

Jesus came to tell us things which were not naturally occurring to us.  God loves us.  God is merciful.  God wants us to love one another and pass mercy on. Simple concepts which we like to take and spin into complicated philosophies which sound pretty good to us or confirm what we want to believe.

Do we really think Jesus is okay with us using our time arguing theology? Really? Arguing, debating, trying to prove to one another that Jesus loves us best is not filling people’s bellies and freeing slaves. We need to pry ourselves off of our backsides and carry on Jesus’s work, as Teresa in Avila wrote nearly 500 years ago:

Christ has no body but yours,

No hands, no feet on earth but yours,

Yours are the eyes with which he looks

Compassion on this world,

Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,

Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.

Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,

Yours are the eyes, you are his body.

We need one another. We are our brother’s keepers. In his last words to his followers at the Last Supper, Jesus said,

“Love one another as I have loved you.”

If we follow this direction instead of isolating ourselves from the hard facts of life, the world would be a much different place. The world needs more empathy, a good thing to pray for. God’s mercy comes through us, when we allow it.

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