No one laughs at God in a hospital

This is a double Book Review for Here If You Need Me by Kate Braestrup and Love Wins by Rob Bell AND a theological debate.

Here If You Need Me is an easy to read and laughable memoir about a minister that serves search-and-rescue workers. I highly suggest this book. Braestrup has an incredible story of encountering religion on the frontlines of life and death.

Love Wins is the latest by New York Times Bestselling author Rob Bell. He discusses the confusing co-existence of an all-loving God with suffering. It raises some interesting conversation points, but it’s kind of scattered. I feel like he was pushed to get this book out to make some cash. Not highly recommended.

Sidenote: I’m on a quest to read 50 books during the calendar year, and I recently finished books 18 and 19. I usually read 5 – 10 books at a time, a product of modern day attention spans, so I’ll occasionally have awesome weeks when I finish a ton of books at once, and I’m in the middle of such a week now.

Anyways, it was interesting to read these books at the same time. Both the books apexed to the same major point.

In one story from Here If You Need Me, Braestrup writes about a day when she accompanied the wardens as they searched through snowy woods and freezing cold lakes for a missing five year old, only to find the missing victim under a thick sheet of ice. The girl was long dead and there was nothing they could do for the family.

This raises the question, and the major point from both books. In any god believing paradigm, how can a god be just, and stand by as five year old girls drown to their deaths? How can gods allow war? Why does suffering exist?

Braestrup suggests that this question, “Why does evil exist?,” is the ultimate theological question.

The answer she gives, is by far the best answer I have come across (slightly paraphrased):

“I am willing to have that theological conversation with a cop, any cop – faithful or faithfree, not because he arrives at my answer, but because he has had to look suffering right in the face. Whatever words he uses for God, he is still the one who had to take the little girl’s body out of the water and see her face and hear her mother crying.

Here is my answer: that cop took the child out from under the ice with his own hands, tried to give her his own breath, and his own heart broke when he could not save her life. He is the answer.”

I believe church is a valuable component to life. A lot of my friends now come from church, and it’s a great place for community, but I think religion/spirituality/God/etc, is found outside of Sunday. This is why I believe God has been walking with me long before I became a Christian a few years ago. This is why I believe God walks with lots of people that wouldn’t be caught dead in a church.

I guess I wasn’t able to answer why a just God would allow five year old daughters to drown. But I will say that God works despite five year old daughters drowning.

I believe God exists in the rescue workers, who hold no conception of working overtime, who are out there in the bitterly cold Maine winters searching for lost five year old daughters.

I believe God exists in teachers forgoing fancy schools and big paychecks to work with disadvantaged youth.

I believe God exists in hospitals where nurses look after patients and scientists hope to find cures to uncontrollable cancers.

I believe God exists in a good friend that will sacrifice their free time to help another friend.

Anyways, I’d love to hear anyone else’s thoughts on this.

from ken

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