Why?

 

A big Thank You to Nann for contributing this blog post. :-)

For Him, Meema

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By Nann

The following is an excerpt from Strange Kingdom by Ken Costa that caused me to ponder this and what I thought about it. As usual, my ‘take’ on this does not harmonize with the popular explanation. 

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Why?

That single word reverberates through every human population in every age, through every nation, tribe, and family that has ever existed, through the experience of every single person on the planet who has ever lived.  

At some point in our lives we will find ourselves asking, “Why?” Or, more likely, shouting, screaming, or crying, “Why?”  

Why does a disease devastate whole populations? Why does a ferry go down with the men, women, and children on board lost? Why does an airplane disappear, leaving behind distraught relatives without even a shred of comfort from knowing what happened to their loved ones? Why earthquakes? Why tsunamis? Why the subtle mutations in otherwise good cells that lead to cancer? 

Why sorrow, illness, violence, bereavement? Why are my prayers not answered?  

Yet, in Jesus’ cries from the depths of suffering and violence on the Cross — the deepest grief ever known — He carried our why with Him.

We are not alone. He understands us, He’s been there, and He assures us that He has a plan to wipe away every tear, to make “everything sad... come untrue,” as J. R. R. Tolkien put it at the end of The Lord of the Rings. No one likes tough times, but those tests add power to our testimony.  

If God didn’t withhold from us His very own Son, will God withhold anything we need?  

Suffering is unbearable unless you know God is for you and God is with you. Because if we think amid our pain and suffering that we are forsaken, we could fall into three possible traps: isolation, self-absorption, and condemnation. “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” is one of the most remarkable questions in the history of humanity.   In fact, this is the only time in the Gospels when Jesus prays to God and doesn't use the word Father. Whenever we pray, cry, or scream, “Why?” we are, intentionally or otherwise, placing ourselves alongside Jesus in a kind of communion with the One who asked that same question of His Father.   “Why?   Why have You forsaken Me, Your very own Son?” We might feel so totally abandoned, so thoroughly rejected, so fundamentally lost that all we can do is cry, “Why?”  

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Yes, the suffering that Jesus endured is unfathomable to me.   Never will I deny that.   But I see it like this . . . God had a plan.  Jesus knew that plan before He left the Father’s presence and was in agreement with the plan.  Jesus knew His Father would never leave Him nor forsake Him.  

Jesus, Himself, told the parable of the wicked managers beating those sent previously and that they would murder the Son, the heir.  Nothing the evil ones plan and plot is a secret from Almighty God.   Father knew they would murder His Son.  So they planned to use that death to bring life to creation!   How marvelous is that?  Outsmarting them at their own game!

Jesus knows when we are at the end of our rope - due to an accident, a death, a devastating event - we believe God is not there for us.   So He stated that on the cross . . . ‘I am at the end of my rope - GOD WHERE ARE YOU?’   The darkness around was the heavens telling the story.   Mankind was in gross darkness.   It was separating us from Father.  

Then came the morning.  The darkness vanished.   Then the grave was empty. Father’s plan had been carried out perfectly!!  

We often don’t see the end of the plan when we are suffering through it. In retrospect, if we abide in Christ, we can not only see but marvel at the outcome.  Our part is to obey and submit to the plan - no matter how dark it gets or how much suffering is involved.  

LUKE 8:17 ESV

For nothing is hidden that will not be made manifest, nor is anything secret that will not be known and come to light.

Luke 12:2 ESV

Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known.

Matthew 21:33-41  ESV

33 “Hear another parable. There was a master of a house who planted a vineyard and put a fence around it and dug a winepress in it and built a tower and leased it to tenants, and went into another country. 34 When the season for fruit drew near, he sent his servants to the tenants to get his fruit. 35 And the tenants took his servants and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. 36 Again he sent other servants, more than the first. And they did the same to them. 37 Finally he sent his son to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ 38 But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, ‘This is the heir. Come, let us kill him and have his inheritance.’ 39 And they took him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him. 40 When therefore the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” 41 They said to him, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death and let out the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the fruits in their seasons.”  

It's Just Not Fair!

And the big question is: where did Victim Mentality come from? 

It surely didn't materialize to rule us overnight, nor even over years. Those who study human history will assure us that it represents the oft repeated pattern of the rise and fall of civilizations. (A reality that is not all that reassuring, btw.) This slow boiling down of our society to a dry scorched pan, from free, strong, independent thinkers to sheep/group psyche, I am ashamed to admit, likely began with my generation - the Boomers.  

So, the Greatest Generation sacrificed, fought for, and died to give the next generation more opportunities for the good life. And then that generation gave us: 

Free Love - Trust No One Under Thirty - Love Love Love - Love Yourself. The Culture of Drugs - Anything Goes. And the lie of Post Modernism.

Then, as the Hippies' frontal lobes semi-matured and they began to propagate many of us (though not all of us) instilled in our progeny that everyone deserves a trophy so no one 'feels' left out, no one has to 'feel' like a failure. Now, since no one can be a failure, everything anyone does is deemed good, so no need to keep trying. Lowest Common Denominator, Grade on the Curve so no one fails. 

GOOD ENOUGH beats BETTER - no such thing as BEST. How you feel is way more important than what you think so, what you think can be interpreted as:

Everything bad that happens to you is always someone else's fault, definitely not yours because you are good. How/what you feel is the ultimate truth and JUSTICE, for you, requires that you be respected. 

Once the lie that all humans are (not just should be free to try to be) equal in every way had fully infected Higher Education, we were officially credentialed to destroy the concept of excellence in order to keep the playing field, ever so righteously level. This didn't happen randomly either. It was a recipe devised by minions of satan but, of course, to understand this, first you must accept that God exists and, therefore, so does satan. 

If you want to destroy a society that was founded on basic rules of common sense, integrity, honor and civility, begin with the children. Teach the children well, as the song lyrics say.  So, though it might look random, it took careful planning and patience to implement the PLAN and make it 'feel' and 'sound' good in the smallest increments so the change wasn't noticed - until the damage was so severe it was too late to reverse it.  It also required that God allowed it to happen because satan is not equal to God. Why though? Why does God allow bad things to happen? To test our mettle? Can muscles be built without resistance? No pain no gain?

To understand this you have to grasp that all things that man sees as good or bad is not how God sees it. Like children, we want candy for every meal but, like a good parent, sometimes God requires that we eat our vegetables. 

Regardless of DNA, in spite of equitable individual human rights put in place by government that allow anyone to CHOOSE one's own attitude and then be accountable for the choice, to either seek a path of being successful or to settle on simply riding on the coattails of and/or blame others, the foundational, unchangeable laws of the Universe, set in motion by an Omnipotent Creator, determine that, excellence will always outshine mediocrity. Best is achievable but requires some effort. And glitter can never be gold.

In other words, things either work or they don't. 

Unfortunately, in a declining civilization, as mediocrity becomes the standard, excellence is viewed as an anomaly and, in fact, an insult and threat to status quo. In the Age of Victimhood the addiction to the false feel-good drug of SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS is blinding and thus the standards that build and hold civilization up can/must be ignored to justify the new lowered bar. Then when things don't work anymore and anarchy takes over, no one can figure out what just happened because blame shift is the common rule.

In a fully implemented justice warrior society, victims cannot see their own level of success because they only see what they are not/have not and they have been carefully conditioned to believe that it's just not fair if someone else outshines them. They will demand their trophy or they will burn down someone else's to reap the justice they 'feel' is owed to them. Because, you know... it's only fair. 

Reminder: Rome was neither built nor destroyed in a day. But it did fall never to be rebuilt. Those who have believed it could not happen to America need to review the absolutes of history.  

For Him,

Meema

That Thing About Faith

 

Our neighbor's barn is old (I can so relate). The wood frame is starting to give way and lean from decades of exposure to the unrelenting forces of nature. The tin roof has been loose for years and easily lifted and slammed back down by even small gusts of wind. And yet it stands, the reason for its original purpose for previous owners long forgotten. Something to do with horses. 

One day, last fall, a fierce storm smacked the roof with giant fingers and rolled the edge of the tin roof like it was pie dough. Some in my tribe think it is now an eye sore but, outlier that I am, I see amazing art and profound life lessons in this damaged structure and marvel at the things it can teach us.

For one thing it is such a strong visual reminder for how fragile we are, though we feel as though we are the controllers of everything. We huff and puff and celebrate the modernity of our collected knowledge. Gosh darn we are so smart. We have logical, educated answers for most everything, and even those things that fall into the great unknown category can still be whittled down to manageable size by simply changing definitions and making subtle word substitutions. We have convinced ourselves that we can control all things with our profound intellect. 

And then, one day, a catastrophe happens and spikes us to the ground like a volley ball. Suddenly we are confused and depressed and distressed and our intelligence is temporarily neutered. In recent months I've heard multiple people claim they have really returned to their faith during this trying era of Covid and political uncivil war. That sounds so good - people returning to faith, now that normal has been curled back like a tin roof. 

But is this a subtle redefining of 'faith' to mean  - 'that unknown thing we believe will surely rescue us because we 'believe'? 

What if the truth is - faith in faith is not quite the same thing as faith in God - it is just another way to say we believe in our own good senses that there may (or may not) be 'something' bigger than us so we might as well hedge our bets. Just in case.

It's a pretty human thing to do. 

But what if true faith, the kind that gives you true refuge in the storm, is believing in that which might not be what we want but what God wants? 

The ugly wooden barn, regardless its distressed condition, still has a reason for being. Inside, up under the eves, birds and wasps build their nests, chipmunks dig their burrows in the stud footings below. In fact, the place is teaming with animal life, even the occasional feral cat litter. 

The animals do not reason with themselves about how good the refuge is. They just accept the reality of it and thus, though it doesn't look good as we define good, it is good, by Higher Standards, nevertheless. 

For Him,

Meema