Down to Earth God

The Problem of Pain

You will appreciate by now that  I don't believe in a God who is pulling all the strings and responsible for everything that happens but that leaves the problem of why a God, who I believe to be both loving and all powerful, doesn't intervene to stop bad things happening.

I won't insult you by pretending to have all the answers because I don't. I can only share my limited understanding and talk about how I have experienced and dealt with this conundrum in my own life.

I've explained elsewhere I don't see the book of Genesis as a scientific explanation of how the world was created. It's more about relationships and a key message is that God created everything to be perfect but things have somehow gone wrong.

At the centre of what went wrong is the issue of choice or free will. The world is essentially out of gear because we have been given the gift of free will. It is a mixed blessing and can be exercised for good or for ill. The world would arguably be a safer better place if we had not been accorded free will but without choice, the ability to respond or not, there can be no love. God is the personification of love and created us to be in relationship with him.

We are not directly responsible individually or collectively for the things that go wrong in our world, least of all the 'natural' disasters but the world is out of kilter, not as it should be.

This is all very well and the best theological answer I can come up with but when the chips are down and bad things happen in your life I can tell you from experience such arguments bring little comfort.

It is innocuous to compare different experiences; to claim that this or that is the worst thing that can happen to a person but I can state unequivocally that the worst thing that has happened to me in my life was to hold a dead child in my arms.

Our ten week old son, a twin, died from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (also known as 'Cot Death') although in our case I almost managed to resuscitate him and he survived in a Special Care Baby Unit on life support a further 24 hours after we found him.

Our son and his twin were christened by the hospital chaplain in the Special Care Baby Unit. They had a kidney bowl for their font and nurses for their God parents but it was the most moving religious ceremony I have ever been involved in.

A few hours earlier I had prayed in desperation, 'Thy will be done' knowing that, if he did survive he would be brain damaged.

Baptism wasn't about getting him 'in the club'; what sort of God would require that from a dying baby? It was about holding him up to God, commending him to God's presence.

If that sounds brave and together that was not how I was feeling. There was a vision in my minds eye, palpably real, of a vast chasm. God was on one side with my son; I separated by grief and desperation was on the other.

It's a hard thing to believe in God but to feel that he has abandoned you. The world seems a desperate and unhappy place where all hope has been rubbed out when you can not rely on your children staying alive.

I began to go to church, more to be surrounded by and feel the faith of others than through my own convictions. I made a kind of bargain with God in my desperation; get me through this and I'll come back to you. God may not have come through with his side of the bargain and yet my faith felt like all I had to fall back on.

We had done nothing to deserve our suffering. It was hard to understand how God could allow such a thing.

It took time and a lot of grief but eventually my mind's  eye conjured a picture of Jesus and there was a tear on his cheek.

The Down to Earth God isn't separated from and indifferent to our suffering. When we suffer, he suffers with us. He is in amongst our suffering and takes it upon himself. We are closest to God when we are at our most desperate and understand our need of him.