Firing God

Karen went to work just like she always did. She kissed her husband good-bye, wiped the dew off the windshield, and made the twenty-minute drive to Oklahoma City.

She arrived in her office around 8:30. At 9:02 a.m., a rental truck blew up on the curb outside, killing her and 167 others. It was April 19, 1995, the date of one of the most horrific crimes in our history: the bombing of a federal building by an American citizen.

Karen was my cousin. I vividly recall the moment, exactly twelve years ago, when I learned she was one of the victims. It’s not something I like to talk about, even now.

Karen was the youngest of five girls, daughters of my father’s sister. My brothers and I were always proud of our beautiful and athletic cousins. Between the four kids of our family and the five kids of theirs, we enjoyed some fantastic volleyball games in their front yard. Time spent at their rural home in Midwest City is among our family's treasured memories.

Now she is gone, the victim of a coward’s act of vengeance against his own government. All they found was her wedding ring and a watch. Both are on display in the museum honoring her and the score of others whose lives were snatched on that fateful day in April.

How do you cope with senseless tragedy? They occur on the grand scale in such events as the recent Virginia Tech massacre, the Columbine shooting, the Oklahoma City bombing and the 9/11 tragedy. But they also happen on a personal scale in countless untold family tragedies.

To be perfectly frank, I don’t know why God doesn't intervene to prevent such horrific events. Yes, I believe that God has granted free will to human beings. But sometimes I wonder if freedom is a gift we can't handle, like giving a million dollars to a child.

Perhaps you are familiar with Dostoevsky's brilliant novel, The Brothers Karamazov. In it, Ivan the skeptic suggests to Alyosha the priest that freedom is a curse rather than a gift: humanity would be better off without it. The devastating effects of human freedom suggested to Ivan that the world would be better off without God.

However, as Ivan deduced and the book’s story line demonstrated, without God there is no moral imperative. The logical outcome of Ivan’s argument was the brutal murder of his own father. The twentieth century proved the validity of Dostoevsky’s point.

Philosophical arguments have their place. But they don’t help much when your son is born with a birth defect, or when your cousin is blown to pieces by a bomb. Sometimes, like Ivan, I’m tempted to fire God. After all, what good is a God who can’t protect innocent children from a terrorist?

Despite my questions, however, two realities keep me clinging tight to Jesus. The first is a picture of him suffering on a hill outside Jerusalem. The second is an image of him serving breakfast on the shores of Galilee. For in the crucifixion God willingly embraced suffering rather than avoid it. And in the resurrection God, against all odds, overcame evil.

The way I see it, firing God doesn’t remove senseless tragedy from our world; it only makes it more tragic. But a God who voluntarily submitted to evil and triumphantly conquered it? That’s a God I can trust -- even when I’m not sure I like him.