Where Were You?

There are people who don't believe in God.
And then there are people who don't believe in God anymore.
Those are not always the same people.
One may have arrived at disbelief through reason, philosophy, science, or simply a lack of convincing evidence.
The other may have arrived there on a Tuesday night.
In a bedroom.
In a hospital.
At the scene of an accident.
Standing beside a grave.
Holding a telephone.
Reading a note.
Hearing a diagnosis.
Waiting for someone to come home who never did.
Sometimes disbelief has a date.
Sometimes it has a name.
Sometimes it has a smell.
Sometimes the body remembers it before the mind does.
And sometimes what we call a loss of faith is not really the loss of an idea.
It is the collapse of a relationship.
You believed God was there.
Then something happened.
And the question became:
Where were You?
There is a child who prayed for the bedroom door not to open.
It opened.
There is a woman who promised God she would change everything if the man beating her would just stop.
He didn't.
There is a mother who sat beside a hospital bed and prayed with a desperation that had no eloquence left in it.
The monitors eventually went silent.
There is a father who still wonders whether he should have recognized something in his son's voice.
There is a family who found the note.
There is someone who screamed.
Someone who begged.
Someone who said:
Please, God.
And from where they stood, nothing happened.
We need to be careful with people who have lived through such things.
Because religious people have an unfortunate tendency to arrive at the scene of unimaginable suffering carrying explanations.
“Everything happens for a reason.”
“God has a plan.”
“He needed another angel.”
“God never gives us more than we can handle.”
Perhaps we say these things because silence makes us uncomfortable.
Perhaps another person's suffering reminds us that the world is less predictable than we would like it to be.
So we reach for a sentence.
Something tidy.
Something we can put around the horror and call understanding.
But there are experiences that should not be made tidy.
A child being molested is not a character-building exercise.
A woman being beaten is not a divine lesson in perseverance.
Murder is not a motivational seminar.
Suicide cannot always be reduced to a missed warning sign, insufficient prayer, or a family that failed to love enough.
And telling a person crushed beneath life that God will never give them more than they can handle may be one of the strangest things we say.
Life gives people more than they can handle every day.
I've seen it.
Perhaps you have too.
People break.
People collapse.
People lose their minds.
People pick up the bottle again.
People put needles back into their arms.
People disappear.
And some people die.
The world is capable of producing suffering so profound that the human mind has difficulty organizing it.
When that happens, the mind searches for an explanation.
It must.
Chaos is psychologically expensive.
The unexplained noise downstairs is more frightening than the branch we discover against the window.
Once the mind identifies a cause, even an unpleasant cause, the world becomes slightly more predictable.
And predictability feels like safety.
So we ask:
Who did this?
Sometimes the answer is obvious.
The man who hit her.
The person who pulled the trigger.
The adult who entered the child's room.
The drunk driver.
The person who lied.
The person who left.
But if we were taught that God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and always present, another question emerges.
A much harder one.
Then why didn't He stop it?
That's the question, isn't it?
Not whether God personally opened the bedroom door.
Why didn't He close it?
Not whether God caused the cancer.
Why didn't He cure it?
Not whether God placed the gun in someone's hand.
Why didn't He intervene?
Not whether God wrote the suicide note.
Why didn't He make the telephone ring five minutes earlier?
Where were You?
I think we should be allowed to ask that question.
More than that, I think pretending we haven't asked it is intellectually dishonest.
The Bible itself is filled with people who looked toward heaven and demanded to know where God was.
Job asked.
David asked.
The prophets asked.
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Those words eventually came from a cross.
Apparently, the experience of feeling abandoned by God is not evidence that a person is incapable of faith.
It may simply be evidence that they are suffering.
But suffering changes perception.
It narrows the world.
When a human being experiences terror, the mind becomes extraordinarily focused.
The room.
The door.
The hand.
The sound.
The smell.
The blood.
The telephone.
The last words.
This is part of how we survive.
But the mind does something else.
It attempts to construct meaning from what happened.
And sometimes, in the absence of an explanation, we build one.
God abandoned me.
Perhaps no one ever said those words aloud.
But the conclusion settled somewhere deep.
If God existed, He would have stopped it.
He didn't stop it.
Therefore either God does not exist—
or He does not care.
That is a remarkably understandable argument.
It is also built upon an assumption worth examining.
If God loves me, He must prevent suffering.
Where did we learn that?
I don't ask sarcastically.
Where did that idea come from?
Because it certainly did not come from observing the world.
And, strangely, it is difficult to derive from Scripture.
The biblical story is filled with suffering.
Abel is murdered.
Joseph is betrayed by his brothers and sold.
Job loses almost everything.
David grieves.
Jeremiah weeps.
The prophets are rejected.
John the Baptist loses his head.
The disciples suffer.
And at the center of Christianity is not a man protected from suffering.
It is a man nailed to wood.
So perhaps somewhere along the way many of us were introduced to a God the Bible itself does not describe.
A God who functions primarily as cosmic security.
Be good.
Pray.
Believe.
And God will keep the terrible things away.
A spiritual alarm system.
And then the house is broken into.
What happens to faith then?
Perhaps what collapses is not always God.
Perhaps sometimes what collapses is our perception of God.
That's not a small distinction.
If you were told your entire life that the ocean was warm and you finally stepped into freezing water, you would reasonably conclude someone lied to you.
But the existence of cold water does not disprove the ocean.
It disproves the description you were given.
There are people who have rejected God when what they actually rejected was an image of God that could not survive reality.
I understand that.
I've done some version of it myself.
I have spent years examining human behavior.
I have watched addiction destroy families.
I have worked inside crisis.
I have seen mental illness, violence, manipulation, and human beings doing things to one another that are difficult to describe politely.
And the greatest evil I have encountered on this earth has generally required a human being.
That bothers me.
Because I believe in free will.
And free will sounds magnificent when we're talking about love.
We want love to be chosen.
We don't want a spouse programmed to love us.
We don't want our children mechanically forced to embrace us.
We understand intuitively that love without choice is not love.
But we rarely follow that argument into the dark.
If a human being is genuinely free to love, that person must also possess the capacity not to love.
The hand capable of holding a child can strike one.
The mind capable of discovering medicine can design torture.
The voice capable of saying “I love you” can lie.
The human will has built hospitals.
The human will has built concentration camps.
Freedom is an extraordinary gift.
It is also terrifying.
And here I must be careful.
Free will does not explain every tragedy.
It does not explain cancer.
It does not explain the tornado.
It does not explain why one child recovers and another does not.
It certainly does not provide a satisfactory answer to every parent standing beside a grave.
I don't have that answer.
I've become suspicious of people who do.
There are things I cannot reconcile.
There are questions I would like to ask God directly.
I have a list.
It's not a short list.
But I have also begun to wonder whether my inability to understand something is sufficient evidence that no meaning exists.
Human beings are remarkably confident creatures.
We can barely predict what our own children will do next Tuesday, yet we sometimes demand a comprehensive explanation of existence before considering the possibility that something may exist beyond our understanding.
I say that as a man who has repeatedly attempted to advise God on how the universe might be better managed.
So far, He has not adopted my recommendations.
Perhaps your problem with God is not intellectual.
Perhaps you have read the philosophers.
Perhaps you understand the arguments.
Perhaps the issue is much simpler.
You prayed.
And the door opened anyway.
If that's you, I'm not going to tell you that you misunderstood the night.
I'm not going to tell you the pain wasn't real.
I'm not going to search through your suffering for a hidden blessing.
Some things are evil.
Some things are tragic.
Some things should never have happened.
And perhaps the first honest spiritual sentence is simply:
That should not have happened to me.
Maybe the next sentence is:
I thought You would stop it.
And maybe that's enough for now.
Because here's something I've learned about relationships.
Silence ends them far more effectively than anger.
Anger is still communication.
A question is still a conversation.
Even accusation is directed toward someone.
Perhaps you don't believe in God.
Perhaps you hate the very idea of Him.
Perhaps the word itself makes something tighten inside you.
I'm not asking you to change that today.
I'm asking something smaller.
Would you be willing to examine which God you don't believe in?
The God who promised nothing terrible would ever happen?
I don't believe in that God either.
The God who needed a child to be molested as part of some mysterious lesson?
I reject that idea.
The God who caused a woman to be beaten so she could become stronger?
No.
The God who killed your son because heaven needed him more than you did?
I would have difficulty worshiping that God too.
But what if the God you rejected is not the God who is?
What if the image was wrong?
What if people gave you explanations because they were frightened by your suffering?
What if they handed you a small God because a small God is easier to explain?
I cannot prove God to you in a paragraph.
I'm not interested in trying.
Faith produced under intellectual pressure rarely survives the next tragedy anyway.
But I can ask you to leave a very small space.
Not belief.
Not yet.
Just space.
A crack in the structure.
A possibility.
What if I was wrong about Him?
Not about what happened.
About Him.
What if the silence I perceived was not absence?
What if the brutality of human beings tells me something about humanity before it tells me something about God?
What if my anger toward God is not evidence that faith is dead?
What if I am still angry because somewhere beneath all of it I am still asking Him to answer?
And what if He is not offended by the question?
There were three crosses.
I keep returning to them.
On one was a man with no theological argument left.
No opportunity to repair his life.
No time to become religious.
No time to understand suffering.
He was dying.
He looked toward the man in the middle and said:
Remember me.
That's all.
I find extraordinary comfort in that.
Because perhaps the first movement toward God does not require certainty.
Perhaps it doesn't even require particularly impressive faith.
Perhaps sometimes it is simply the willingness to look in His direction.
You don't have to call it belief today.
You don't have to join anything.
You don't have to forgive anyone.
You don't have to pretend the door didn't open.
Just consider the possibility that the story of God you were given may not be the whole story.
Leave the door cracked.
Ironically, I know doors may be difficult for some of us.
So perhaps a window.
Leave a window cracked.
A possibility.
A glimmer.
And if one day you find yourself with no prayer left, no theology left, and no certainty left—
perhaps three words will do.
Remember me too.
The man on the middle cross said you can come.