Week 3 Reading – Art of Possibility Chap 5-8

I am in a season of the year that always comes back to haunt me (not in a bad way), but rather in reminding me how far I have come. Nine years ago on August 14, I was reading from the book “How Now Shall We Live” by Charles Colson. I was finishing up the section dealing with sin and evil with all the questions that are connected to those issues. One of the questions in particular is why would God even make the world if he being all knowing knew that evil and suffering would come into the world. The conclusion the author came to was that God judged that it was better to bring good out of evil then to suffer no evil at all. That the mystery of God wanting to be in relationship with us made it better to endure the pain of redeeming us than to never make us at all. Why would He do that? The only answer! Love. His desire to be in relationship with us was worth it to him to endure the pain of separation and see the suffering we, his created, would go through knowing that he would pay the price for us. After reading that I had to spend time worshipping the God who loves me.

Little did I know that I would have to hold onto that thought because the next morning when my fourth child was born my family and I would be entering into a time of great desperation, pain and suffering. The chapter in “The Art of Possibility” that reminds me of this time the most was “The Way Things Are”. My daughter was born with a heart defect that required surgery but required her to be a month older so that she would have a better chance of surviving due to her strength factor. But we couldn’t wait too long or complications of her condition would then begin to weaken her. We had to work through this balance because that was just the way things are when fighting for her life. The day finally came for her surgery, September 11, 2002, one year after. Oh well, that’s just the way things are. Maybe we could redeem the day. All went well with the surgery and she was in recovery but as we moved into the next day it became evident that her little body wasn’t able to with stand the shock that happen to her. Even though everything was tried, the balances needed inside her body could not be maintained and she died.

How now should we live is the question we faced! It was at this time that all the paths, highlighted in the chapter, one could go down when faced with a desire for wanting things the way they “should” have been or the strong impulse to escape, live in denial or blame started to present themselves. I tried all those but none of them lead me to the exit of my pain and that of my wife and children’s. We were like dry bones in the desert longing for water. Then the battles with second-guessing came. Should we have gone to another doctor even though he was the best (94% success rate with the condition that Sophia had)? Was there something we forgot to do or could have done better? These battles with all the conceptual realities were dangerous. They are a great example of the tension between the calculating self and the central self outlined in the chapter of “The Rule of Six” and elaborated in “The Way Things Are”. Instead of beating myself up with the calculating self by examining all of the endless conceptual realities I should have put my belief in trusting the physical reality of she was just too frail to withstand a shock that severe to her body. That is just the way things are. But the complete release of all that pain didn’t happen until my wife and I would read to each other passages from the bible that would speak deep to deep and soothe the soul because the word would speak to the central self of who we really are and the calculating self would have to take a back seat. One of our favorite passages was Isaiah 35 where it talks about streams in the desert that burst forth and brings the desert to blooming. That thought that answered why God would allow such suffering because he judged it better to bring good out of such pain then to never have had it at all makes me think I would rather have had one month with Sophia then to never had met her at all. I can now understand that kind of love. This is the flower that is blooming out of that is “the way things are” desert.