Dialogue: There are some questions that don't have any answers

I received an e-mail just before New Year in response to last week's column which brought tears to my eyes - tears of sadness, tinged with frustration and a large measure of helplessness. The reader wrote:

"I couldn't help responding to your column this week. I am truly fascinated by the idea that God protects you and presumably yours. Let me tell you a little about how God protected me and mine in this semi-miraculous millennium year, 2000.

"This time last year I had three beautiful children aged from 16 to 11, all of whom had been in perfect health all their lives. They were golden children and I fancied that it had something to do with my parenting skills.

"Silly, silly me.

"My eldest son, born after great effort and medical intervention, was perhaps the most special. After much pain and mental anguish for me, he was born on the 8th of April, 1983.

"He was a clever, inquisitive child from the beginning and in 1999, in the fifth form, sat the sixth-form exams. But the beginning of this year, he felt unwell and by the 13th of March was diagnosed with leukaemia.

"The prognosis was very favourable at the beginning but he quickly deteriorated. My son complied with every request the doctors made of him. He had always been a gentle and giving child but, despite the most rigorous chemotherapy imaginable, he became weaker and weaker and died on the 3rd of November.

"We prayed and prayed to help our son but it was to no avail. Are we less important than you who have always been protected by God?"

I wish I had a pat answer I could trot out which would bring comfort and understanding to this family, whose heartache and bewilderment must be beyond the comprehension, and certainly the experience, of most of us.

But I haven't, for it is the age-old question of pain and suffering, the answer to which has defied the greatest minds of every age, probably since time began and certainly for the past 2000 years.

And it is a question which has exercised the minds of nearly every one of us at some time in our lives, either in questioning some tragedy that has befallen us personally or after observing at a distance some disaster that has brought death and suffering to thousands, and even in some cases millions.

It is at times like those shared with us by this distraught mother that I am thrown back on my book of life, the Bible. I have what I call a "scripture of last resort," one that was spoken through God's prophet Isaiah:

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.

For as the heavens are higher than the Earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.

And that always reminds me of the words of Jesus himself to his disciples on the night he was betrayed: "I have many more things to tell you, but you cannot hear them now." Which tells me that God has kept to himself a few secrets that, if we knew them, would deny us the blessing of faith.

So I have invented a filing system in my mind, one of whose cubby-holes is labelled "God's business," and into which I put all the unanswerable questions, such as that posed by our reader. Call it blind faith if you like; it's all I've got.

For I have to believe, not just from knowledge of God derived from his word, but from personal experience, that he is indeed in control of this world and everything in it and that nothing happens save that he permits it; that he does take a personal interest in every one of his children, which means every one of us.

I have believed in God for as long as I can remember and gave my life to him as a 13-year-old at a Bible class camp. Yet a few years later I learned to drink alcohol, became addicted to the stuff and ended up a fall-down drunk, a dead man walking, at the age of 35.

In my sickness, despair, degradation, humiliation and terror, I cried out to the God I'd learned about as a child and shunned as a drinker - and he must have heard my cry. For, although I didn't know it at the time, my obsession to drink was taken from me and I have been abstinent to this day, given by God's infinite grace a second chance at life which thus far has lasted more than 25 years.

Put simply, the question posed by the bereft mother is "Why me?" To which the only satisfactory answer I have ever heard is "Why not?" And if that sounds thoroughly unsatisfactory, even cynical, it's all I have to offer.

Perhaps God just needed a clever, inquisitive, quick-learning, obedient and courageous teenager in the suffering-free Kingdom of Heaven.

* garth_george@herald.co.nz