In
my last post, I mentioned some difficult times that I've gone
through. It's a little weird to say that, because there was no great
tragedy, no single life-crushing event that made life hard.
Nonetheless, my struggles and the pain I experienced were real.
Throughout the past two years, I've been on a journey that has
significantly changed my worldview and self-view. I've grown so much,
and I can't imagine who I would be without these experiences, but the
journey to get here was honestly a difficult one. But that's the way
it is: you can't build a new and healthy worldview without
sacrificing your old one.
This portion of my journey began in Fresno, the summer between my sophomore and junior year. Through God's direct leading, I was part of a summer project called the Fresno Urban Internship(FUI). It's a 5 1/2 week program that gives college students the opportunity to learn about the inner city and poverty-related issues, to experience working and living with people from different cultural backgrounds, and to simply be challenged in profound ways to live for God. The program tends to meet people in different ways, bringing different challenges to different individuals. For me, the single most important thing I took away from FUI was an understanding that this world is deeply broken. Prior to that summer, I think I would've said that the world wasn't so bad off. But spending weeks learning about institutional injustices and interacting with the disenfranchised on a daily basis, after that how could I continue to believe that the world is OK?
I learned a lot of stuff that summer, but the realization of the depth of the world's brokenness is what set the stage for the coming year. As you might imagine, when your worldview changes drastically, so must your view of God. The God that I knew at the time didn't fit into a world of suffering. I was engaging with the age old question of theodicy in an immediate, personal way. If God is good, omnipotent, and omniscient, why does suffering exist?
Answering this question was once something of an intellectual exercise. An important question because it was part of my witness. But that year, the question went beyond the intellectual level and cut to my core. I was wrestling with the idea because I felt that I no longer knew who God was. At Urbana, I attended a seminar led by Kent Annan and Enel Angervil, called Suffering and Faith. They opened with two simple premises:
1. We do not have a God that prevents suffering, we have a God that is always with us in our suffering.
2. We ask a theological question: "Why is there suffering?" God responds with a practical and ethical answer: "Go, be with those who are suffering."
The full audio of the seminar is available here. These two truths are beautiful in their simplicity, and yet humble in their reach. I want to answer the question of theodicy in full, but it really isn't a puzzle that I can solve. There exist some theological answers, and some of them may even be right. But I believe that as long as we live on this earth, we'll never be satisfied with the existence of suffering. There's something poetic about that, right? We're never satisfied by our answers to suffering and brokenness, because deep down we know that they should not exist!
Which leads us to the punchline of our second premise: Be with those who suffer. What once seemed an order sent down from on high has become the very purpose of my life. In the face of brokenness, at first I ran and hid, looking for the safety of an OK world. By God's grace, He changed me, took me out of that world that doesn't exist. Now, with a fuller (though still imperfect) understanding of the world, God has brought me to a place where all I want to do with my life is participate in its healing. I don't always know how, and when I do know how I often don't do so well. But that's the journey as far as I can tell: as I am being healed by God, I am participating in God's healing of the world.
This portion of my journey began in Fresno, the summer between my sophomore and junior year. Through God's direct leading, I was part of a summer project called the Fresno Urban Internship(FUI). It's a 5 1/2 week program that gives college students the opportunity to learn about the inner city and poverty-related issues, to experience working and living with people from different cultural backgrounds, and to simply be challenged in profound ways to live for God. The program tends to meet people in different ways, bringing different challenges to different individuals. For me, the single most important thing I took away from FUI was an understanding that this world is deeply broken. Prior to that summer, I think I would've said that the world wasn't so bad off. But spending weeks learning about institutional injustices and interacting with the disenfranchised on a daily basis, after that how could I continue to believe that the world is OK?
I learned a lot of stuff that summer, but the realization of the depth of the world's brokenness is what set the stage for the coming year. As you might imagine, when your worldview changes drastically, so must your view of God. The God that I knew at the time didn't fit into a world of suffering. I was engaging with the age old question of theodicy in an immediate, personal way. If God is good, omnipotent, and omniscient, why does suffering exist?
Answering this question was once something of an intellectual exercise. An important question because it was part of my witness. But that year, the question went beyond the intellectual level and cut to my core. I was wrestling with the idea because I felt that I no longer knew who God was. At Urbana, I attended a seminar led by Kent Annan and Enel Angervil, called Suffering and Faith. They opened with two simple premises:
1. We do not have a God that prevents suffering, we have a God that is always with us in our suffering.
2. We ask a theological question: "Why is there suffering?" God responds with a practical and ethical answer: "Go, be with those who are suffering."
The full audio of the seminar is available here. These two truths are beautiful in their simplicity, and yet humble in their reach. I want to answer the question of theodicy in full, but it really isn't a puzzle that I can solve. There exist some theological answers, and some of them may even be right. But I believe that as long as we live on this earth, we'll never be satisfied with the existence of suffering. There's something poetic about that, right? We're never satisfied by our answers to suffering and brokenness, because deep down we know that they should not exist!
Which leads us to the punchline of our second premise: Be with those who suffer. What once seemed an order sent down from on high has become the very purpose of my life. In the face of brokenness, at first I ran and hid, looking for the safety of an OK world. By God's grace, He changed me, took me out of that world that doesn't exist. Now, with a fuller (though still imperfect) understanding of the world, God has brought me to a place where all I want to do with my life is participate in its healing. I don't always know how, and when I do know how I often don't do so well. But that's the journey as far as I can tell: as I am being healed by God, I am participating in God's healing of the world.
This is awesome, Chewy. Powerful thoughts.
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