Weathering Storms

Countless theologians have stated this in one form or another over the years. Blaise Pascal wrote, “In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don’t.” Do we really believe that God loves us and is keenly aware of every intricate aspect of our lives? Do we really believe that he cares about our struggles, hurts, hopes, and dreams? Or are we deists? Do we believe in a Creator God who simply set up our world in motion like a watchmaker winding up a mechanical clock and letting it run down until the end of time? Or are we fatalists? Do we believe life is nothing more than a random collection of chance events, spontaneously occurring with little or no degree of divine oversight? How we think about God is one of the most telling things not about God but about us. In other words, we all carry in us a set of theological beliefs or constructs that define us.

When we face some crisis event and we suffer in some way, our theological constructs come head-to-head with our life events and circumstances. Depending on the quality of those concepts or constructs, the qualities of our coping methodologies are determined. A healthy view of God will most probably produce a healthy coping methodology. If we have no theological construct on suffering but only a theological construct on faith healing, we will not cope well when we face serious illness. If we are focused on the miracles of Jesus yet ignore the life of Job, we will not cope well. The quality of our theology will significantly determine the quality of our resilience in times of personal crisis.

One day I had a young woman come into my office. Christine wanted to talk to me about the loss of her baby shortly after she was born. She was a very attractive professional woman with an above-average intellect and a profound sense of justice in this world—a rare combination of brains, beauty, and moral veracity. I remember clearly her well-thought-out and articulate questions and protests against her pain. Her questions revealed not only her deep sense of loss and pain but also her outrage and sense of violation at the hands of a God who was supposed to love her. She vented, “Who does God think he is that he can allow this child to grow in my womb and allow me to attach to my baby just to snatch her away from me at birth? What right does he have to play with my emotional life like that? Who does he think he is?” Her anger at God was evident. Her questions were existential, and her pain was grief. Where was God in this? How could faith in his goodness be recovered after this? How could she ever trust him again? And let’s face it; these are good questions—the very kind that needed to be asked.

Christine’s theological constructs were painfully evident in her questions. God controls everything, and thus he bore some responsibility in her baby’s death. God was therefore an active participant in her pain—perhaps even the cause of it. These are the pervasive theological constructs that surfaced and challenged her faith in the face of crisis. How we think about God matters. If we are immature in our theological constructs, when crisis hits, as it surely one day will, we will face the very kind of questions that Christine did. The quality of our theological constructs will determine the quality of our coping methodology. Do these beliefs about God stack up experientially? Christine’s journey was a journey in reexamination of her theological constructs—a time of finding God in a deeper and more rational down-to-earth dimension.