A Truce with God

Many of us who experience Radical Loss share this sensation of being assaulted, besieged, under attack.  We feel that vital relationships have been torn away from us, leaving gaping and bleeding wounds.  We experience betrayal, abandonment and extreme vulnerability.  

Suffering produces enmity between God and me/us.  The question really is not about God’s existence.  If God doesn’t exist, then there’s no problem.  Or perhaps, as N. T. Wright suggests, the problem is transformed into the problem of good.  If there is no god, then why does anything good happen?  The problem we wrestle with is whether there can be peace between God and me/us after suffering.

The writer of Job understands that suffering makes us enemies of God and perhaps of one another.  The solution, therefore, is not an intellectual answer to a philosophical problem.  The outcome is either peace or war.  If God is God, then God cannot lose the war—unless God chooses to do so.  Since God has made that choice through the faithfulness of Christ on the cross, we therefore can have peace with God as the gift of God.

At first however, perhaps the best we may be able to do is to declare a truce with God.

So, we marshal our resources, pull up the drawbridges, close the windows, bar the doors and retreat into ourselves for safety and some chance of recovery.  The attacks seem to come from covert blinds, and we can’t decide when to duck for cover and when to flee to the hills.  As we live with loss, we also may feel that someone or something is out to get us, even if we may not be able to identify the attacker.

I think about a personal example at this point.  When I entered my second pastoral call, we bought our first house.  We loved that house as our first real family home.  Our boys lived their toddler and early elementary years in that house.  We decorated and re-decorated.  We bought our first real furniture (as opposed to all the hand-me-downs from family that filled our other homes).  

We had neighbors and friends.  The boys could walk to school.  We strolled the neighborhood in the cool of the evening and had friends over for dinner and cards and celebrations.  We played catch in the backyard and planted flowers by the front porch.  We had a porch swing and landscaping.  We put ourselves into that first house in ways that we can’t now even imagine.

After several years of drought, in the spring of 1993 the rains came and didn’t stop.  For a variety of reasons, our basement began to take on water.  Over and over for weeks at a time, we vacuumed and mopped and toweled and sponged the lower level that included our family room.  

We burned out three wet-dry vacuums.  We replaced the carpet and wall coverings twice.  Once, the water came almost to the top of the basement steps.  We installed three sump pumps and tiled around the house.  All of this happened while we tried to sell that house, because I had taken another pastoral call.

It seemed that the house itself had become our enemy.  It felt like the house was attacking us from below.  The attack was relentless, and we lost most of the battles.  This home we loved and into which we had poured such time and effort—now it was betraying us in our time of need.  

I remember collapsing in tears one morning on the bed after having moved water for nearly forty-eight hours straight.  The combination of rage, exhaustion, fear and confusion was simply too much.  The house was our adversary in a watery battle.  In the end, we fought to a kind of draw, got the house sold, and moved on.  It felt a lot like a retreat in defeat.

Even now when we drive past that home once in a while, I cannot look upon it with unmixed appreciation.  It will always bear the shadow of enmity.  It will always be the location of that battleground—the great deluge of ’93.  And that house will always wear the mask of the enemy.

I wonder if our experience has some small resonance with Job’s sense of loss.  We didn’t lose our children in addition to our home.  We didn’t suffer a massive breakdown in personal and physical health.  We weren’t betrayed and critiqued and corrected by spouse, friends and neighbors.  

Nonetheless, we felt that we were at war in the midst of our loss.  We were under attack, besieged and beset.  Worst of all, we couldn’t fully identify the enemy.  I have heard such descriptions from many people who experience Radical Loss.  Job is our patron saint at such times.