14 - Crossroads
“Coddled people will not be good listeners when their world collapses. They will be numb with confusion and rage at the God who wasn't supposed to allow this. ‘If this is the way God is, why didn’t someone tell us?’ [My aim] is not to meet felt needs, but to awaken needs that will soon be felt, and then to save your faith and strengthen your courage when evil prevails. These are big, deep, weighty, strong truths. Truths for pestilence and war and personal calamity. These truths are made of steel. I know that a tire iron cannot caress a bruised heart, but if your car is rolling over on you and about to crush you, a cold, steel, perpendicular tire iron might save your life. Then later, at home, as you tell your story, tears will flow, and Jesus will hold you as you sob for joy.”
- John Piper, Spectacular Sins
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Like I said before, the emotion that I felt the most was anger. I couldn’t understand why God would allow so much suffering and I was enraged. I didn’t want to hear anybody’s lazy, rote, Christian answers that people bounce around in theological conversations in church hallways and hipster coffee shops. I couldn’t care less about that. I didn’t want to hear answers that I already knew because I grew up in a Bible church. My thought at the time was, “Don’t you dare give me answers to questions you have not actually thought about or felt the depth of, except for in ‘a book you read once or a sermon you heard one time.’' I didn’t want to hear it.
I wanted God to answer.
I wanted to hear from him directly.
I was standing in all my anger, looking him full in the face and demanding he answer me. Like Jacob, I wasn’t going to let go until he blessed me. In my mind, he wasn’t getting off the hook with, “embrace the mystery of his sovereignty and goodness” or “we’ll never know those answers to the problem of evil here on earth”. If my kids were going to grow up in a hell hole, God better have something to say about it.
I had no idea that I felt this deeply about it until a few months after I got back. This wasn’t just a “phase” I would go through. This would turn out to be one of the crossroads of my life. All of the pent up anxiety, tension, and hurt from the past year was rushing out and I was ready to quit and walk away; not because I didn’t believe God existed, but because my anger and grief was so deep that I didn’t think I could ever forgive him for letting a world of such great suffering exist.
I remember so many times sitting and weeping over my students. Why were they growing up there? Why wouldn’t God just want to scoop them up in his arms, like I did so many times, and never let anything bad ever happen to them? Why wouldn’t he rage against the evil around them and protect them from it? I wanted to. I would have if I were him. If I had the power to control their destinies, I would be doing a much better job than him. I couldn’t understand it and my heart was broken over and over again, every day when I thought about it. It was a hard few months and my struggle was deep.
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Journal Entry - September 2015
“Do you trust me with them?”
Tears pouring down my face.
Wet journal pages before me.
God asks me again, “Do you trust me with your Palestinian students?”
I want to. I have to. He's the only option. Growing up in a war zone - they don’t even know they’re unsafe. The idea of a missile falling on their house is not a surprising one. The feeling of fear as an Israeli tank rolls down their street is not uncommon. The gunshots of the military and the rocks falling on Israeli cars as their older brothers and sisters fight against military occupation is completely normal. They don't know what it’s like to grow up with a front yard full of lush green grass, playing soccer with their neighbors, as their parents chat on a big front porch with no fears in the world.
So, do I trust Him as my kids grow up in this part of the world?
My tears poured out at this question. How could the three year olds I grew to love as my own, grow up in constant fear of death? How could they grow up in a war they didn’t start? How could they grow up and get the brunt end of a bad deal simply because of their race? Simply because they’re Palestinian? I can’t bear it! It’s not right.