I regularly read a blog called Waiterrant.  I appreciate this writer’s sense of humor and his honesty.  A while back he wrote an entry about Hurricane Katrina and all those who were not saved and died gruesome deaths.  He was struggling with the question of suffering and why these terrible things happen and why, if
there is a God, doesn’t he do something about it?  Waiterrant attended a Lutheran seminary at an earlier time in his life but quit at some point and his current feeling seems to be that there is no God out there.  As
he wrote about his distress over this situation and the common desire of people for an omnipotent being who can save us from this mess he described his escape into a local church to spend a few moments in contemplation.  I really appreciated his expression of anger and frustration and the many questions that arise out of such a tragedy.  Here is part of his blog entry entitled The God Who Drowns:

Suddenly the door to the church noisily swings open. I look up. An old woman shuffles in and laboriously makes her way up the central aisle. She smiles as she passes me. I smile back. This old lady’s like a hundred and two. Her head’s drooping below her shoulders, her womanly form obliterated by age and gravity. I watch her slow progress as she marches to the front of the church. I shake my head. To be that old, that frail, that weak. Then I remember something I read in seminary long ago…

“God is weak and powerless in the world, and that is exactly the way, the only way, in which he
can be with us and help us.”

The guy who said that was a Lutheran pastor named Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was executed by the Nazi’s
for trying to assassinate Hitler. This man knew Evil up close and personal. But he still cherished his faith in God and his belief in the goodness of the world. How did he do that in the face of such monstrosity?

Because he realized that God was not all powerful. He knew God wouldn’t swoop down and save him from his jailers. He understood there’s no division of sacred and profane, any secular and divine. He saw there’s only one reality and he believed that reality was God. And from within that insight he wrestled with the mystery of suffering.

God, Bonhoeffer would say, suffers with us. He shares in our pain. If you’ve ever been to a child’s funeral you know the only thing you can do is cry. God is like that person weeping in the funeral parlor. It was God who was pulverized when the Towers fell, it was God who burned in the Nazi’s ovens, and it was God who drowned in that nursing home in New Orleans.

That’s a hard lesson to learn. Maybe it’s not an answer at all. But the older I get the more this explanation makes sense. It is the only way I can wrap my mind around children dying and old ladies drowning.

But within Bonhoeffer’s words lies a challenge. Since God doesn’t come down in a blizzard of special effects to bail us out – we have to help each other. We recognize the suffering of others and are moved to relieve it. We can’t coop ourselves up in our apartments, churches, and mosques wishing all the bad things will go
away. There’s no room for childish magical thinking. We have to act. The rescuers of 9/11 and the Gulf
Coast understood this without all the fancy theological reflection. Bonhoeffer would say when we help each other that is God helping us. The human heart is moved by weakness not by strength. It is our brokenness, not power, that binds us together. Perhaps our weakness will be our salvation. Maybe that is how God “can be with us and help us.” Who knows? I’m only a waiter.

What an awesome way to look at tragedy and the way God might work in it.  I can identify with this feeling of uncertainty.  Wanting to believe but not really being sure there is something out there to believe in.  I also like the way this puts the responsibility on us to care for each other. It seems too often Christians
spend their time praying for a situation rather than getting their hands dirty.  I’m not saying prayer is useless but more often than not there are practical ways we can be of service to our fellow human beings as well.  I am thankful that there are people out there willing to be honest and vulnerable about their
doubts and struggles.  Christians often don’t make this easy for people who don’t share their faith.  We more often become critical and defensive rather than just listening.