Some friends and I drove down (which means "south" if you live far enough north) to Iowa today.
At face value, this might seem like a fun little field trip. We did end up having a good amount of fun, but this trip was founded on highly unfortunate circumstances.
My friends Ann and Taylor, who recently moved to India to do two years of mission work, have come back stateside to be with family because Ann's sister passed away. The funeral was today and so my friends and I drove down (again, south) to support Ann and Taylor, as being uprooted immediately after putting down roots in a foreign country because of the death of a loved one is probably one of the more difficult things through which one can go. Hell of a sentence, that one.
The funeral was in Webster City in a big, solid Lutheran church that was erected in 1953. The way that I know the church was erected in 1953 is that there's a big stone slab built into the outside wall with "1953" etched into it. My observational skills are unmatched. I've seen those things on multiple churches, but I don't think I've seen them anywhere else.
There was a sermon preached by a minister who sounded just about exactly how a non-Iowan might expect a small-town Iowan Lutheran minister to sound.
Oratorically, he wasn't the most captivating guy ever. I'm not bringing this up to knock the guy, but rather to give you an idea of how difficult it may have been for him to hold the attention of several of the funeral's attendees solely on the merits of his public speaking ability. I'm not pointing that out to knock the guy, either, but to give you an idea of how gripping his subject matter was for me when he got to this point:
Sometimes a person dies and, for a while, the only thing we can think is why? Why this person? Why now? Why in this manner? Why something that seems so wrong? Why not something that seems more right, more fitting?
These sorts of questions are especially appropriate in the case of Ann's sister, Emily, whose mind never developed past a certain point, leaving her mentally much younger than the 34 years she lived on earth. She had a series of seizures, her brain went without oxygen for several minutes, and all normal brain activity ceased. Her family made the unenviable decision to remove life support and Emily stopped breathing and died peacefully. When the minister started pulling out the whys, though I had never met Emily and was not in any way connected to her life, you better believe I was paying attention.
This line of questioning by the minister reminded me of my favorite co-worker, whose name is Gustavo. He's from Oaxaca, Mexico, and he's short enough that a lot of us in the kitchen just call him Pequeño, which means "small." Gustavo is possibly the hardest-working man I know, in addition to being hilarious and more than a little bit feisty. More endearing to me than all of these things is his big heart. He genuinely and deeply cares for the people around him.
Gustavo and I will talk about things of a religious nature every now and then, as we share faith in the same God. When we do, things often come to a line of questioning like that of the Iowa minister. Gustavo is a very sensible, reasonable person, and that quality works together with his big heart to frame these sorts of questions in a way that hits me much harder than when other people ask them. Additionally, we're often talking in Spanish, and so I'm concentrating harder on each word and its meaning.
He'll ask me why. "Por que, Jon?" We'll talk about his ailing mother and Gustavo, who wears his heart on his sleeve will ask me why. We'll talk about large-scale human suffering and I'll see how much the troubles of others can hurt him and it just punches me in the gut. I just stare at him and say "no se." I don't know. I can never answer his question. In that situation I can't get past empathy and start articulating thoughts on a complicated matter.
I don't know why. I can't answer the whys. All I can say to the whys is that I know that God understands it better than I do, is more compelled by human suffering than I am, and is more capable to deal with it than I am. That's enough to keep me walking. It doesn't always convince the other person in the conversation.
But I am comforted when I think about certain realities of death. Regardless of how much death can confuse us - Why? Why this person? Why this way? Why do they have to suffer? Why must we lose them? Why did you let this happen? - regardless of how much we think God has to do with our death, whether by permissiveness or deliberate action, regardless of how wrong it seems that we die, often in ugly, grueling, and terrible ways, regardless of the worldly circumstances surrounding our death and whether or not God was interacting with them...
Whatever was wrong about when or how or how soon or how tragically we die, something will be right. Whenever I die, God will then do whatever is most pleasing to him to do, whatever is most right in his eyes to do.
How much time and energy do we spend on that here? A lot of the people I spend time with spend a lot of time trying to figure out what is most pleasing to God to do with their lives, trying to figure out what God's will is for their lives.
When Jesus taught us to pray, he asked God to let his will be done. Whenever I die, that will happen. I will be removed from the influence of the things of this world and be placed in the hands of the most wise, most skillful and most compassionate of caretakers.
Something will be right. Something will be made absolutely right.
