From Safety to Adventure

Perhaps I thought I was safe from it all--from the conflict and division, from the illness and dying, from the pain and loss.  I don't think I was that conscious of taking it all for granted.  Feeling safe was more like breathing than thinking.  We had our near misses with mayhem, but there was nothing out of the ordinary.  The bad things that happened to us over the years were primarily of our own making, so we could rationalize those things.  

We both had fathers who died too young, so we had some intellectual awareness that this would likely happen to one of us.  And we assumed that it would be me.  Perhaps that was part of it--that our expected order of dying was to be me first.  We had plans made.

I think, however, that we assumed we were exempt somehow.  I think that many around--family, friends, parishioners--assumed the same thing.  I was a pastor.  We were good people doing good things.  We had gotten our kids safely raised and didn't have to declare bankruptcy in the face of student loans.  Our general health was good and we took care of ourselves.  We didn't take any foolish risks, but we also rested in the safety, the ordinariness, of our lives.

I wonder if Job also felt safe.  He was righteous.  God attested to that.  He didn't take any chances.  He made all the right sacrifices for his children.  He did all the good deeds.  He was wealthy.  He was wise.  He was careful.  He had it covered.

I remember the story of the centenarian who was asked in an interview about the secret of living to be a hundred.  His answer was delightful.  "Live to be ninety-nine," he said, "and then be very, very careful for a year."  Our life seemed to be like that.  Live up to now, and then be very, very careful for a while.  But we know that life doesn't really work that way.  It didn't work that way for Job either.

The four corners of his life collapsed all at once, just like the house that killed his kids in the windstorm.  Suddenly nothing was safe.  God was the enemy.  His wife told him that he should just curse God and die.  His friends were judge and jury with God waiting as executioner.  The world had seemed such a benign, soft, lovely place.  Now it was filled with threat and betrayal.  The world was anything but safe.

Big anxiety is the companion of anyone in serious bereavement.  My pulse still increases when Brenda catches a cold.  It looks and feels a little too much like the "flu-like symptoms" that marked the beginning of the end for Anne.  Those little germs are not safe.  

I couldn't go out in public for weeks and weeks--at least not in familiar places with familiar people.  I had been dismembered, and I didn't want to bleed all over everyone.  I was afraid that I would die, and sometimes afraid that I wouldn't.  I was sure I was messing up every decision and disappointing the whole world.

That lovely, safe place that was our world had turned into a planet of horrors for me.  I know now that I was not atypical in my experiences.  The notion that the world is a safe place is an illusion.  Things happen.  People die.  It's terrifying.

Safe.  Then not safe.  What comes after that?

One option would be cynical despair.  Some people choose that.  Since the world is not safe and reliable and running on autopilot, then nothing is worth the bother.  Everybody sucks.  Then we die.  That's a simple, clear and wrong response.  Cynical despair is just a way to die while still breathing.

Another option is to retreat even further from life.  It all hurts.  Its all scary and threatening.  So if I just pull back, keep my head down, tend to my own knitting--maybe nothing else bad will happen.  That's a simple, clear and wrong response.  Withdrawal is also just a way to die while still breathing.

The third option is trust.  For you that may not be trust in a loving God who is here and active in the face of the tragedy.  You may place your trust in someone or something else.  For me, however, trust in God is precisely the answer.  The world is not safe.  But God is faithful and we can join God in driving back the forces of death and despair.  The choices are not between safe and unsafe.  The third option is to engage life as adventure.  That's where the hope is.

It takes Job most of forty chapters to get to that place.  I'm glad he did all that heavy lifting for us so that we can skip to the end of the story if we want to see how it turns out.  I can tell you, however, that the only real way to get to that place is to walk through the pain along with Job--to debate with his friends and to wrestle with God for an answer.  

That's not a safe path by any means.  As C. S. Lewis reminded us in Narnia, our God isn't safe.  But our God is indeed good.  This is Job's discovery.  And it is the discovery in one fashion or another, I think, for many of us who find life and joy and hope and meaning on the other side of traumatic loss and Radical Grief.