Is God The Joker?

In the wake of last week’s Aurora shootings, we have all been inundated with the stories of horrors and miracles.  On Friday morning I scanned the news headlines and while saddened and confused by the news coming out of Denver, I have to say I read them in haste, busy with my own day.  It was not until later when I checked my phone.   The screen was full of missed calls and texts from friends back in Denver.

Petra Anderson was shot – call me
Kim’s daughter shot in the head – PRAY! 
Call me when you get this!!!

In the days since the shooting, Petra’s story has become a well-known one around the world.  For we know now, Petra was born with an unseen defect made just for Friday morning.  She had a secret passage way for a bullet to pass through her brain, leaving it intact.  Her life was spared.  The world-wide community of believers has cried out “God is good!”  And we believe it to our core.  God is Good. 

But those standing on the sidelines of faith have shouted back,

What? You must be kidding. A six year old is dead and her mother is paralyzed.  Mothers and fathers and widows are mourning, and your God is supposedly good? 

Their awe has turned to anger.

Our pastor back in Denver wrote a beautiful blog post yesterday.  While the posting was uplifting, many of the comments were challenging and raw. 

One reader named TJ challenges:

Why were all those other people who were KILLED not saved by God, including a 6-year-old girl? I guess he likes to play favorites… I guess God is the Joker.

Those last six words are so full of hurt, fear, and anger, that you can palpably feel it.  Is God the Joker?  It's a good question.  From the sidelines of faith it's easy to answer yes.  In situations like this we are faced with our limited understanding of our own world, and frankly we don’t like it very much.  We want desperately to understand.  We want to know the rules that the world spins by so hopefully we can have some sort of control.  There is a leap in the theological debate that says:

 If God is good, the world would be good, but the world is not good, so God cannot be good.

It is easy to see how the conclusion is drawn:

 God is not good, so I don’t want this God.

I hear in TJ’s painful comment that perhaps he feels that if God likes to play favorites, TJ would prefer not to play with him.  Perhaps in TJ’s life he has not felt that God has favored him.  It is a common experience.  Burden upon burden upon burden seem to fall in some people’s lives.  It is easy to see how life’s pain hardens into the belief:

God plays favorites, blessing some people, but He didn’t pick me to favor, so I won’t pick Him to follow. 

I believe this thinking comes from being followers of the American Dream and students of the American Media.  You see the American Dream has led us to believe that life should go well for us.  That we deserve to prosper financially, live happily, and die at an old age.  The American Media shows us stories of the crooked that prosper and the good that fall on hard times.  They start their programs with five minutes of horror stories and flippantly end the broadcast with a miracle.  A happy little story to leave us feeling good, where the people say, “God has been so good.” 

If you take a minute to see this from the perspective of the TJ’ s of the world,  it’s pretty easy to understand his belief system.  He and millions of other Americans have been left mistakenly thinking that the world is full of horror and wrong, but somehow God should be praised in the moments of “good luck”.

When your heart is set on the American Dream and your eyes feast on American media, it is easy to fall into the belief that God is the Joker. 

But what about when the bullet slices a different way?  When the cancer treatment doesn’t work?  When the child doesn’t come home?  What if the media ended their daily programs following Christian families with those stories?  Then TJ could see the true and deep side of faith.  The faith that still says through nashing teeth and sob choked breaths, God is Good.   Because believe me dear TJ, that is what is said by those who are followers of Jesus Christ and students of Scripture.  You see we are living under very different expectation than the American Dream. 

We are following a God who has already told us:  In this world you will have trouble.  But take heart!  I have overcome the world.

We are educated by scripture full of stories of people whose lives didn’t go well here on earth, but who put their faith in God who promises us a better life to come.  We’re living by the examples of barren women, men sold into slavery, wandering homeless old men, and death row prisoners.  In these lives we see that while this world is full of trouble, God is using it all for his glory. So that when the bullets fly in our life we can fall to our knees and know there is a much bigger picture here than a shattered American Dream.   We can trust in a better world to come after this one.

I have seen it in the life of Reagan Joy who spent just one day on earth.  I have watched it in the life of my friend Joanne Heim, whose recovery may not be complete until she reaches Heaven.  And we now all have the privilege of watching Petra continue on her path.  Through all this we say, “God is good,” and we mean it.

You see we know God is not the Joker.  He told us the truth that we would face trouble.  It is also true that He has conquered this world.    He loved us so much that He sent His Son to pave the path for us to a better life.  A path back home, out of this temporary fallen world, to a far greater one. 

Yet for the living, those waiting to reach that better world, God calls on us to be His hands and feet to those in need.  While the media may have wrapped up Petra and her mother Kim’s story with a nice little bow called A Miracle, the reality is that Petra has a long road of recovery and Kim has a difficult battle to wage against cancer. We can all be part of blessing this family with another miracle by donating to the Anderson Relief Fund to defray medical costs of Petra’s hospital stay and Kim’s treatment.  Please consider giving and please share their story through reposting this blog, Pastor Brad’s or one of the many media stories. 

Making Family Special

Our house is full this week.  We are blessed by a visit by Pete’s Aunt Betty, his cousin Katy and her two kids Kacie(9) and Kyle (5).  Each morning I have woken up to hearing the door chimes go off announcing that Kacie and Emily, our early wakers, are headed out with Lucky (the dog.)  It warms my heart to get out of bed and watch them from my window.  While Emily never, NEVER takes Lucky out in the morning without some serious begging on my behalf, she eagerly is sharing this duty with Kacie.  Watching them head down to the pond, pj clad, hand –in-hand is so beautiful to me.   They are cousins, and friends.

This has been a week to think about family.  With our recent move thousands of miles away from family, building relationships with any of our family is going to take effort, a lot of effort.  It was easy in Denver for my kids to go to Grandma’s house which was only a short walk from ours. It was easy to schedule sleepovers with cousins who lived 20 minutes away.  Now it is not so easy.  This week has reminded me that it is worth it though.  It is worth the planning, and the loud house brimming with kids, and used up frequent flyer miles. 

I treasure the fact that Betty and Katy were willing to pile two kids in the car and drive a LOT of hours from Florida to spend time with us.  The little kid days are flying by fast I realize as Kyle , who was just the baby, talks to me about baseball and John Deere, and Sarah has squeaked by both Aunt Betty and Aunt Katy (a fabulous accomplishment to her, while an inevitable to us!) 

I am reminded of two aunts that invested in Pete and I as kids.  Aunts that visited and made us grow up feeling special.  Funny, they both were named Aunt Sue.  Pete’s loved on him in a powerful way that kept his father’s memory alive and made him know a life bigger than he saw was actually his future, not just his dream.  She handed over her first computer to a kid, and let him take it apart just to put it back together again.  She loved him.

My Aunt Sue put a little ballet dancer on a plane to San Francisco to sit next to her in a balcony box of the Jaffe Ballet’s performance of the Nutcracker.  She took me backstage to meet the cast. She gave me a little red satin pair of pointe shoes to hang on my Christmas tree when I went back home.  I still hang them on my tree each year, probably my favorite ornament to hang. 

Having the cousins and aunts here this week, I am challenged to think how I can be that special aunt.  How can I pour into these kids and some special ones back in Denver.  I want them all to know that they are loved.  They are some truly special kiddos.  I know I am not doing a fabulous job at that right now.  I am challenged in that. 

But of course our God is so good. So providing.  I was blessed to be introduced to Katy’s friend Hope this week.  She blogs at TheFlourishing Tree.  She blogs on Monday’s about being an aunt.  An intentional, special aunt.  An Aunt Sue.  I can’t wait to keep reading her posts. 

Were you blessed by a special aunt or uncle growing up? Are you being that special aunt or uncle now?  I would love to hear how.   I would love some suggestions or inspiration. 

How We Worship with our Kids – The dreaded sermon time

When Pete and I started keeping our kids with us during church, I knew it was not really realistic at 8 and 5 (now 9 and 6) to be able to sit nicely, listen and learn something from the sermon.  I wasn’t worried about the praise portion of the service.  They love to sing.  I was mostly just worried about the sermon.  They don’t love to sit. It is just not in Emily's nature.  I knew I needed to figure out something for the girls to actively “DO”.  Instead of making the focus of my amateur “worship training program” a long list of things not to do during the sermon, I wanted to give the girls something they were supposed to do. 

(Now that I read my thoughts on this, I think it is possible that this idea came from dog training tv show I watch.  Well please don’t tell my girls that.  But it works!)

So my solution was church journals.   I have long been a sermon note taker.  If I visit a church and they have one of those fill in the blank sermon inserts, I am ridiculously happy.  For many years my sermon notes have been scratched out on the corners of bulletins, but then later thrown away.  When the girls started joining us for service, we all got journals. 

The girls were given a few options to do in their journals:

1.       Draw a picture of what you hear (for Emily,6)

2.       Copy part or all of the scripture reading

3.       Write down things you don’t understand

4.       Write down what you do understand (mostly for Sarah, 9)

After church, we get out our books to discuss what we wrote on the way to lunch or at lunch.  The motivation of knowing that you lead our family discussion when we are talking about what you wrote, has been Emily’s big motivation.  Being the little one, she loves to lead the conversation, and somewhere along the line she figured out that if she only wrote one or two things, her turn went by fast. 

This is Emily’s entry from a few weeks ago.  The sermon was on the 23^rd psalm.  She is currently in a phase of writing down words she doesn’t know.  This has led us into great lunch conversations. According to Emily, this list includes: examine, grief, renew, restore, rod, staff, transform, dwell, pursued, gratitude. 

This is Sarah’s entry from the same sermon.

Sarah tends to either write out the scripture if it is one she doesn’t know it.  But if it is familiar like this one, it is easier for her to follow the sermon and write down sermon points. 

I love that we have a running record of what we are learning each week.  I know it will be a treasure to look back at at the end of the year, or in years to come.  I hope if you’re looking for something active for your kids to do during worship this idea is helpful.  I would love to hear other ways you may be engaging your kids in your Sunday worship service.