Dear Erin

The following are letters written to a fictional character regarding personal tragedy, God’s sovereignty, and negotiating the onslaught of questions and doubt that follow in their wake. Though fictional, they are prompted by the daughter of a friend, who is as real as the tragedy she endured.

Dear Erin,

When we heard of the sudden and tragic death of your close friend and roommate, we were shaken. Though we did not know them personally, you and your family are family to us, and we felt the tremors in our own hearts from the impact of the death landing in your own. Both her parents dying in the crash alongside their daughter, pushes the tragedy into the realm of the catastrophic. We are so sorry.

Soon, the pain will quiet down enough to make the barking questions echoing in your head unable to be hushed, and then begins the honest, frightening, infuriating, but necessary search for understanding of where God is in all this, which, I presume, prompted your letter to me.

Having attended a Christian school as long as you have, no doubt you have engaged in philosophical conversations on theodicies – the defense of God’s goodness in the face of evil and suffering. When discussed in the classroom, there is enough distance from real tragedy that it is easy to be calculated and objective, and an all-knowing, all-loving God presiding over all things harmoniously comes together in our minds as a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with the crust cut off.

But this kind of academic or philosophical faith can be the equivalent of a kid who is confident he could beat up a bully, having daydreamed many times about doing so, while never actually having confronted one. Now, feeling death’s spidery touch twiddle across your own heart makes what seemed clear and obvious, tenuous and doubtful, and you feel like that scrawny kid standing in the shadow of a very real bully towering before you.

In times like these, it is a very natural response to want to summon God to the dock and demand an account of the tragedy. Having staked not only your welfare, but your salvation on God’s power to save, much rides on His response. If He is omnipotent and really was the one turning the knobs and pulling the levers of the universe that brought about the tragedy, it calls into question His goodness and trustworthiness. On the other hand, if He was just as surprised as you were that the car careened off the road, or was powerless to stop what He knew would happen, it may ease the previous problems, but creates serious questions about His power to protect you from future chaos. Jumping out of the frying pan of His carelessness, you hop into the fire of His impotence.

And so tragedy chases us to the black mouth of a slot canyon, where these two equally unsettling options loom up before us. Questions hound from behind, darkness and uncertainty hem us in from the side, and the unscalable slick rock of the canyon sides forbodes no way out other than through. And most frightening of all, if you do enter in seeking an answer, what happens if you are met with an eternal silence in the thinning space?

If you look around the entrance to the cavern, you will see the remains of others’ faith, rusted out and abandoned like so many dead cars, because people didn’t like their choices between a life with a capricious God or a powerless one. Believing those to be the only two options, and knowing that any return to faith would require navigating the canyon, they turn around and take their chances with the desert; at least it is predictable, even if it is dry and lifeless.

But what they did not consider was that the tragedy and the destabilizing questions that followed brought them to this canyon because they were meant to. Resolution only comes through confrontation with the canyon, by squeezing yourself between the rock and the hard place and inching your way through the dark. God is not intimidated by our questions; He is not hiding from them. He sent them to chase you to the canyon, and He is waiting on the other side, down by the creek, for the reckoning.

Before we enter the canyon, though, we need to understand God’s disposition towards human suffering. When we see His heart towards death, it acts as a light for us, a spark of hope that He is not as distant as it feels, and provides some confidence that we will not find Him fumbling the ball or bumbling with excuses. And so in this first letter, I don’t want to address either of those baying questions that you have bravely chosen to face. Instead, I would like to tell you the story of the first time I felt Death, and what I saw of God’s heart toward His creation in it. This may give you the same firefly light it gave me that will glow in the future dark.

I have been, as you know, an ER nurse for a long time. Before that, I worked in a nursing home where old people were dying with such regularity that the Grim Reaper parked his hearse in the handicapped space outside just to save on gas. Fifteen years in emergency medicine introduced me to the untimeliness of traumatic death, when Death comes unexpectedly to claim fathers of young children or the children themselves. I have seen lots of dead bodies, missing limbs, and life-altering diagnoses. I have been at the bedside when the doctor calls us to cease resuscitation efforts and the hollow, hallowed silence in the room that follows. None of these experiences caused my heart to shiver and moan as one night in the early morning hours of a long night shift, when I felt Death’s stinger bury in my heart.

It was the time of night when a very late dinner turned into a very early breakfast. I was zombie tired. Things were mighty slow, with a trickle of patients coming through the front doors; enough to keep you awake, but not enough to keep your jaw from hanging slack. Then the triage nurse, with a disconcerting amount of hustle in her step, whisked a father carrying a bundle of pink blankets to one of the trauma bays. Inside the pink was a 3-year-old girl, limp, mottled, and barely breathing.

We began our work feverishly. She was unsuccessfully poked and prodded multiple times to find a vein to give her medicine and fluids, but nothing. Helplessness taunted. Finally, just after we drilled into her thin leg bone to administer medicine, she seized. Then her heart gave out. After a prolonged resuscitation of rib-crunching chest compressions and jolts of electricity to her tiny heart, we got her back. I saw her beautiful, sedated little eyes open and fix on her daddy’s face. The helicopter arrived, we packaged her up, and off she flew to Children’s Hospital in Denver. It was the most challenging patient I have ever had, yet we performed admirably and snatched her from the maw of Death. There is no better feeling.

The next day, I came into work to find that she had died on the operating table in Denver. Sepsis. She perforated her bowel, I believe. These memories summon tears easily provoked, even after fifteen years.

Generally, I am not an emotional person. Even if I were, the ER would have cauterized those emotions into a scarred nub. But when I heard the news, a visceral reaction erupted from the bottom of my heart, roiling and spewing dark clouds of nameless emotion. My knees weakened. I could feel my spirit within me scream a mixture of anger and sadness that could only be expressed by screaming “NO!” till all the wrath was wrung from my lungs. I wanted to destroy a city; I wanted to melt like wax; I wanted to crumple up the world in my fist; I wanted the same world to fall on me and surrender to its weight. Broken, I wanted to break, to curse, and to cry.

In that moment, the alien nature of Death had never been more apparent. The unnaturalness of Death, the most natural thing next to birth, seemed an infection imposed on the human race. And this little, beautiful girl was eaten by it. She was the same age as my own daughter at the time, and to think of the beautiful, smiling face that found comfort in her daddy’s arms, and all the butterfly kisses and princess twirls that were stomped out in the span of an afternoon, is difficult to think about even still. She was cut off.

And it was no one’s fault! She wasn’t abused or murdered, no malicious uncle or crazy babysitter could be the locus of my anger. Death itself was to blame.

Later that day, I read the passage in John 11 of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. You know the story. His friends asked him to come visit and heal the sick Lazarus, no more than two miles down the road. Instead, Jesus stays put another four days, during which time Lazarus dies. When he arrives, the heartbreak of his dear friends is palpable, both from the death of their brother and the seeming indifference of their Lord and friend.

Now here is the important part. When Jesus sees where they have laid Lazarus, He is “deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled,” and weeps. Oddly, the Greek word used here means “to snort” – not like a snorting laugh or the nostril puff of a frustrated nobleman, but the snort of a bull stamping and pawing the ground. He was angry. As for the other word, “troubled”, we get the image of a man agitated into action, unable to sit still, like Mike Tyson pacing the ring, waiting for the round bell to demolish his opponent. Yet at the same time, he weeps. Jesus’s emotional concoction was equal parts rage and heartbreak.

That was how I felt! In a way, distant and diminished from his divine emotions, I experienced the same feelings toward Death as Jesus. Death in all its forms is a result of man’s sin, even the accidents and cancers where no one is at fault, yet even given man’s deserving, is met with compassion for his creation, and anger that we must suffer the consequences. We see here, more than anywhere in the Bible, the heart of God towards the suffering of His creation. Death is an alien invader infecting the bodies of His image and snatching them away. Whether by the slow sapping of strength over time or the sudden swerve of a car off a road, this enemy will claim us all. As angry and sad as you have felt over the loss of your friend, Jesus felt as angry and sad over his.

But perhaps the oddest thing of all in this story is that Jesus has this reaction even though he knows, in about four minutes, he is going to call Lazarus from the grave. The sisters will have their brother back, and he will embrace his friend. Would have been easy for him to say, “Chill out, calm down, I’ll take care of this.” Yet still, knowing the future reversal of Death, he pauses and feels its weight; he sympathizes with our suffering and feels it himself. I am so grateful he did this. It comforts me that he suffered in all ways we did, even with tears over a friend.

For now, sit with this story. Let his tenderness towards suffering decalcify the protective carapace that so quickly forms over our hearts in the wake of tragedy; it may provide temporary relief, but it is cold comfort. It’s not even waterproof.

Even though we did not answer any of your questions, and the slot canyon still looms ahead dark and thin and long, it is necessary to see His heart towards Death before we enter. He is not distant or uncaring. He is not a detached superior intelligence that looks curiously at a tear rolling down your cheek, poking it awkwardly with a forefinger, as though human emotions were an enigma. And as the end of the Lazarus story shows us, neither is He impotent. Indeed, He feels and has felt Death’s sting deeper and more profoundly than we can imagine.

In my next letter, I would like to enter the slot canyon with you and deal with some of the questions you have asked. In the meantime, think about which of the two slot canyon walls you are more afraid of being true? That God is impotent and unable to stop tragedy, or that He is all-powerful but uncaring? And if it were proven that either of these is actually the case, how would that change your faith, expectations, and prayers?

Looking forward to hearing from you soon.