It is almost instinctual, a reflex. We almost cannot seem to help it.
When people suffer, especially those we know and love, we rush to name a reason for their suffering, to explain away maladies as mere preparations for greater blessings, to minimize pain so as to make way for God’s glory. As Kate Bowler writes about her experience after being diagnosed with cancer, “Most everyone I meet is dying to make me certain. They want me to know, without a doubt, that there is a hidden logic to this seeming chaos.”
How much theological malpractice have you and I practiced when we have acted like an omniscient narrator, certain of the whys and wherefores of the lives of our loved ones? How much raw arrogance have we stood on as we swept away pain? How much misdirected empathy have we inflicted upon the lives of people we know and love because their pain was simply too difficult to hold? How much broken theology has sought to make orderly what has been torn asunder by the cruelties of disaster?
