In this continuation of the conversation “When Church Hurts”, Gina and Loisa explore the goodness of God in the midst of suffering.
Click below to listen starting at 23:14 to follow along.
Is God Good in our Suffering?
Loisa:
So another piece of the puzzle for me in this story is, during this same period of time, I left home to take care of a sick family member who was dying of a brain tumor. I took care of her and was part of her around the clock care team till she passed away, or almost till she passed away, hospice came in. She was young, she was innocent, and it wasn’t fair.
I remember, one night just, I ran out into their orchard and just buried my face in the dirt and screamed at the top of my lungs and said, “How can You be good?” And He said, “If I’m good, are you willing?” And it took those years to work out the answer to that question. I did not know how to answer at that moment.
Actually, I was feeling unreasonable. Like, I can’t just keep “faith-ing”, or muscling my faith. We say, “God’s good when good stuff happens, and if bad stuff happens, that’s the devil.” and that feels real contrived. That doesn’t feel real to me. I’m a four on the enneagram, so if anything smacks of not being real, I’m done.
What I realized is that walking through the shadow of doubt is the only way to get beyond the shadow of doubt. So never resent the journey through that, because that’s where you get on the other side of it.
My Scale of Good vs. God’s
So that journey through, for me, was part of realizing I’ve been rating what I see as the actions of God, on my scale of good. So here’s my scale from 0 to 10, and everything God does and everything His church does, I’m putting on my scale. And it’s answering, “God, are you good? I’ll let you average it out at the end of the day.” And what a limited, poor example, because my definition of good changes all the time. It changes depending on what information I’m on, and what I’ve read today, or what the weather’s like, it’s changing all the time.
Then it struck me that God is not landing on a scale. He is the scale. He is setting the spectrum. So it was coming to a place of letting Him set the spectrum. I tried to approach my faith intellectually. I know you don’t have to abandon intellect to be a person of faith, but you can’t only be a person of intellect, because the spirit is such an involved part.
I tried to read the Bible intellectually and it literally stopped making sense to me. It was like I was reading in another language, and I remember one night actually throwing my Bible across the room because it was so weird. It was freaking me out, and it didn’t make sense to me. All of a sudden this book that had been comforting, and this book that had been all these things to me, I had shut that down for the desire to be truly authentic, and to not let those things be false in me.
You can’t read it from a totally intellectual perspective, because it’s a spiritual book.
So I just love science, and what brought me back really into being okay with God, and being okay with the Bible that makes sense in the fact that it doesn’t make sense, was actually Einstein’s theory of relativity. God and Science are never going to disagree. Not in reality. There’s always a missing piece if they look like they disagree, or there’s always something that’s been misinterpreted.
You do not have to abandon your brain to believe in God. You do not have to abandon scientific evidence to believe in God; they always go together, and it’s so fun to me to discover those things. Anyway, the theory of relativity was this moment of going, “If the speed of light is impossible, if mass can never actually reach the speed of light, and yet we live by it every day, then science tells me there’s more, that the impossible is actually what we live by.” Science tells me that.
The other piece was that C.S. Lewis has a book called, “A Grief Observed”. That book is him walking through the loss of his wife and being very real and very authentic about questioning God. It’s almost scary to think, “Are we allowed to question God this way?” And it’s like, “Yes, totally. That’s the way we get to real things.”
As long as you don’t set up camp in the shadow of doubt, you have to keep walking through it. So just hearing his journey of investigating, “Could God not exist?” Let’s investigate that. So he goes through that in this book. Anyway, those are the things that could be a whole other podcast, but those are the things that brought me back to my everyday walk with the Lord.
Gina:
So those are the things that brought you to that place where you are alone, protected in your little bubble, which is you and God. You were like, “Okay, God, you and I we’re good now, but I’m going to still stay away from those people over there, your bride. I want nothing to do with that, because we’re fine. And then in that context, that is when God says, “You can’t love Me and not love my bride.”
Loisa:
Yeah. So I’m here in Texas and I’m thinking, “Okay, I’m going to start going to every tiny church I can find.” Because what I’m thinking is, if I don’t want what happened back there to happen again, I need to find the opposite of what that looked like. And that’s not true. I’m here at Gateway now, and I really have never been in a healthier place than this place is, but it’s still humans and they still hurt each other.
So I feel like the point of all of that journey is coming to a place of realizing that God has figured out how to love humans, even as they are human, and we have to get there too, or at least trust Him in the meantime. There is a desire to see us represent Him well to this world, and that is a Holy desire. That is a Christ heart desire. When He is not represented well to this world, or to us, it is devastating on a whole different level.
We are not Him. And I think we make the mistake of saying, we want grace for the broken, we want grace for the people outside, and specifically outside of the church, and we forget that we also need grace for each other. That even goes for this position of being wounded, of having grace for the people that I think are wounding other people.
So this washing of grace, and realizing we’re not going to get it right, we just have to keep trying, we can’t give up, don’t grow weary. In the pursuit, don’t grow weary in doing what is right, because in due time there’s a harvest, and it is in God’s time. He’s letting us work out our faith with fear and trembling, and that has to be within the context of one another.
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Check the rest of this conversation God Get’s Personal, Forgiveness is the Way Forward, When Church Hurts
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