Pride…or Obedience?

“Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” John 15:13 ESV

As I write this commentary, my society here in America is in the cold, dark depths of the Coronavirus outbreak. Times are frightening, and things may not improve for weeks or months. Medical supplies, the tools our healthcare ‘troops’ use to fight this invisible enemy, are in critically short supply. Testing materials, physical protection equipment, are all being used up at phenomenal rates, with no supplies left with which to replace them. Respirators in particular, which can under the right circumstances carry us through the hardest hours of an infection, are very hard to come by, and some of us are using the shortage to generate increased profit. “Supply and demand”, don’t ya know?

We are physically separated from one another, one in every six of us has lost his or her job, around us our economy crumbles away, and all we can do is watch it go. And be afraid. Many of us can’t pay our bills, may not have jobs to go back to when this is eventually over, and through no fault of our own face the loss of everything we have built for ourselves; our home, career, possessions, whatever ease of life we have been able to scratch out. Waves of stress pound on our rocky cliffs like never before, and as we stand on that precipice with nothing else to do with our time but watch, too many of us feel like the earth under our feet is turning wet, slippery, beginning to give way to those waves.

This feels……..biblical, in its scope.

Jesus’ words in John are hard words to live by, especially in times like now, when a few days from today any one of us could really, truly face the gut-wrenching choice of ‘do I go on a respirator, or allow someone else to take that slot?’.

What does my faith require of me? What might my Lord and my King want from His servant? 

We can debate who is a ‘friend’ in the eyes of the Lord. It’s also important to point out that Jesus doesn’t command this, He merely states it. But there it is, nonetheless.

I think the question every person of faith needs to consider is, ultimately….how will you live out your faith? Is God more important than your own life? Your life has always been in God’s hands, and surely if He wishes He can save you through the fire, respirator or no. The Bible shows us this. But this choice is at the heart of Christian faith. Is me first, you next…acceptable?

How will you choose to understand Job 13:15? “Though he slay me, I will hope in him; yet I will argue my ways to his face.”‬ ‭ESV‬‬  It’s not honest to just look at the first part of that verse, and ignore the last. Will you trust God all the way to death and beyond? Or will you argue with God, protesting your innocence before Him and disagreeing with His perfect will?  God never directly responded to Job’s arguments, He just forcefully reminded him which of them was God and which was not.

What do you take from that? If God allows you to become infected, will you choose to potentially save your own life, or potentially save someone else’s? A terrible choice to face to be sure, but it could happen. For some of us, it will happen. Your own life over another’s? Or faith in God’s saving hand, His miracles?

Even in the theoretical, that choice looms. The boastful pride of life…or sacrificial obedience?

Bad Things and Good People

Why does God allow bad things to happen to good people?

How can a loving God allow such hideous things to occur as the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut?  If He really is good….

…If He really is good, then those twenty children would still be alive.  Those six adults would never have been faced with that terrible decision, the choice of giving up their own lives to possibly -maybe- save the lives of the little children in their care.  That’s what we want to think.  Because that’s the easy answer, the simple answer.  If He really is good, He would have stopped this terrible, heart-shredding THING from happening.

But life isn’t that simple.  It doesn’t always work like that.  Faith, real faith, is about more than just church services and living a “good life”.

The answer to that question -Why?- is Susan Goodman.

You don’t know Suzy Goodman.  Except you do.  She was born in 1943 in Peoria, Illinois.  She lived a normal life.  She was a beautiful girl, a high school homecoming queen, who grew into a beautiful woman.  After graduating from college, she married her college sweetheart, and she and Stan were happy.  She found that she was pretty enough to find work as a model.  Life was good.

Then, on a Tuesday in 1976, like thousands of other women before and since, she found a lump in her breast.  She was diagnosed with breast cancer.  She was 33.  Old enough to have tasted life, to have gotten a handle on it, learned how to enjoy life, to enjoy the fruits that life has to offer.  Old enough to have found someone to spend her life with, and to have begun spending that together life.  Old enough to have begun many things.

She didn’t die immediately.  She fought.  The cancer was beaten back, more than once.  She carried on her fight for several more years.  But in the end, despite having won many battles, she lost the war, and in 1980, her life was taken from her.

She left behind many who loved her very much.  Her husband, her parents, and most importantly, her younger sister Nancy.  While Suzy was alive, Nancy promised her sister that she would do everything she could to end breast cancer, and Nancy was as good as her word.  I said you know Suzy Goodman, because her husband Stan’s last name is Komen.  And now you know that the “G” in Susan G. Komen…..stands for Goodman.

Nancy Goodman Brinker followed through on that promise, and in 1982 she created the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.  Since it’s beginning, the organization now known as Susan G. Komen for the Cure has raised hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, much of which has gone towards research to someday eradicate breast cancer.  They have done untold good, have saved thousands of lives through breast cancer education, teaching women to be on the lookout for the early signs of breast cancer so that it can be caught and stopped.  And some day, Nancy and her organization may just find that Cure they have worked so long and so hard for.

But none of this good would have ever happened……if Almighty God had not allowed Susan Komen to die from breast cancer.  So that her sister could harness her terrible personal pain to do great works, for the benefit of God’s daughters.

Sometimes, faith means the willingness to give our lives to God so that His plan can be brought to fruition…..through our suffering.  Or our death.

So what possible good can grow out of the deaths of these innocent children?  I don’t know.  Faith means believing that the same God who allowed this…..thing…to happen loves us, and has a plan for us that will eventually result in these tiny lives being lifted up.  Loved all of his children so much that He to allowed these little ones’ lives to be taken away so that a greater good might be born from their deaths, and from our grief, and rage, and pain.

So rage.  And cry, and mourn, and pour out your pain to Him.  Trust that His heart is also broken over this outrage.  And have faith in Him, and His ultimate, undying love, for these children, and their teachers, and for each of us.

There is a plan.