A Response to the Deconstruction of Faith.

There’s a lot of conversation taking place these days about deconstruction in regards to the Christian faith. A growing number of Christians, especially those who come from a conservative/evangelical expression of Christianity, are sharing their experience of deconstruction. Some are becoming the so-called “dones” and renouncing their Christian faith altogether while others are just leaving behind their evangelicals, becoming the so-called “exvangelicals.”

This is a conversation of interest to me because earlier in life I went through a deconstruction period myself. This process happened as I began my seminary studies and was brought about by the existential crisis that followed after the death of my oldest son.  Kenny’s death raised questions about God and faith that I didn’t have answers for. My faith was shattered and in some sense, lost. Although there are some questions (perhaps many) I still have, I did find faith again but I left behind the sectarian/fundamentalist understanding I was raised in for good.

It actually turned out that seminary was a great place to lose faith because I had people that God worked through to rebuild a ruined faith. Not only am I still a Christian but I have gone on to serve as a pastor and I do so with faith as a follower of Jesus, who understands God as merciful and gracious, abounding in steadfast love (Ps 103:8). My faith shapes my interest in the conversation regarding deconstruction and what I’m about to say.

First off, there is nothing inherently wrong with deconstruction. Anyone who ever questions something they have held to be true is deconstructing in a sense. The reasons some Christians go through a process of deconstruction vary but one thing should be clear, they have questions for which the answers they currently have are inadequate. Is asking questions wrong? Hardly!

That leads me to one other point I want to make. If you want to be of help to someone deconstructing their faith, listen. Don’t respond, just listen to understand. It’s clear that some of the people who have or are deconstructing their faith have experienced significant trauma in life. Some of this trauma has been caused by toxic churches where abusive pastors have created great harm through sexual abuse, racism, and misogynism, where churches have not only woefully misread the Bible and weaponized it against people. So listen because any criticism will only amplify that trauma. Listen to understand, and then, in time, if you have earned the person’s trust, God might open space for you to help sort through questions in a way that leads to a healthy reconstruction of the Christian faith.

I say that because, as I mentioned before, I am the recipient of some people who graciously listened and understood. And I’m still here because they did.

 

Advent Love

Mary, the mother of Jesus, is just a young Jewish girl from a small village called Nazareth. In other words, Mary is a small-town girl. She lacks significance because she is a Jew, she is a woman, and she comes not from a prominent city like Jerusalem but a small village like Nazareth. Yet Mary, of all women, is the one whom the Holy Spirit will come upon, with Mary becoming pregnant with the Son of God in her womb.

And Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”

~ Luke 1:46-55

The story of Jesus’s birth isn’t disembodied from the reality of the world. Far from taking place in a sanitized vacuum, the story that Luke tells takes place within the very struggle of human life. Jesus is born to a young girl without any significance about her. Yet Mary sees significance in what is taking place, knowing that God is redemptively at work, as  she rejoices saying, “for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.”

This past Sunday was the fourth Sunday of Advent, with the theme of love and namely the love of God. So a good question might be who does God love?

Well, technically everyone. God loves everyone and so everyone matters to God. Except for the world has yet to figure this out. The powers that our world operates by don’t go courting the poor, the people of lowly stature like Mary. The lives of everyone from the unborn to minorities to the people living in both rural poverty and urban ghettos are trampled upon so that mighty and powerful can remain mighty and powerful. Yet Mary believes that God has looked on the lowly with favor because God has looked upon her

The only problem is that this blessing of salvation from God that Mary believes hasn’t exactly happened yet. That is, it is not fully realized yet and so it’s still to come and that is what Mary believes will happen. But it will only happen through the real struggles of human life, everything from the birth pains of labor to Jesus eventually being crucified on a Roman cross. So as we reflect on the story of Advent as told in the Gospel of Luke, don’t forget that this redemptive act of God is embedded within the very real human struggle of life.

There are two pictures of Mary below. One is a rendition of Mary struggling through the birth pains of labor. The other is a rendering meant to capture the beauty of Mary holding her baby, Jesus. I don’t know anything about labor pains and am not going to pretend that I do but I like the picture because its a reminder that the story of Jesus’s birth is embedded within the very real human struggle of life, which includes labor pains. But I do know what it is like to see my child born and hold that child for the very first time, as many of you do as well. And when you hold your child for the very first time, there is a beauty that words just cannot fully describe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Taking both pictures into account, we have a reminder that God can bring about beauty from the very real human struggles of life that we all live through in one way or another. We are beautiful people that have been fearfully and wonderfully made by God but our story is also one of sin and shame, struggles with grief and doubts, sometimes so great that we want to hate ourselves.

This the love of God. As Christmas day approaches, remember that Mary believed not what God had done but what God was going to do. My hope is that as we remember the birth of Jesus, the Son of God, that we will believe as Mary believes. And so believe, not just what God did back in Bethlehem but what God is doing and will do when Jesus Christ comes again.

Advent: Peace

This past Sunday was the second Sunday of Advent, focusing on the peace that is revealed and received in the coming of Christ. With the peace of God in mind, we have the Old Testament reading from Malachi 3:1-4…

See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple. The messenger of the covenant in whom you delight—indeed, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts. But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap; he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, until they present offerings to the Lord in righteousness. Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the Lord as in the days of old and as in former years.

Malachi prophesied at a time when life in Israel was full of covenant malpractice. Everything from profane sacrifices offered by the priests in the temple to matters like sorcery, adultery, and oppression of the poor were rampant. But Malachi speaks of a day when the Lord will come and his people will once again be a pleasing offering. So I’m not sure if the words of the prophet were heard as good news or not but they do raise the question of who can endure.

Advent invites us to anticipate the coming of the Lord and with his coming,  the shalōm that is the Lord’s to give. Such peace isn’t just the absence of violence, though we certainly welcome a world in which violence is no more. Peace is a life of wholeness which is concerned with the well-being of our lives so that life, in its totality, is made complete. From a Christian perspective, peace is the reception of God’s new creation in Christ. The peace of Christ that is born in Advent with the coming of the Lord has to do with an entirely new community, a refined and purified community in whom God’s righteousness is the way of life.

Advent reminds us that God’s new creation, a righteous life of peace that comes through the refinement and cleansing of the Holy Spirit, is revealed in the coming of Jesus Christ, our Lord. The question for us is how do we participate in this new creation? How do we participate in the coming kingdom of God?

Well, well by faith, of course. But wait… 

Malachi mentions both a “governor” in the first chapter and then the “temple” in our text this morning. All that is to say that Malachi likely prophesied in what we refer to as Israel’s postexilic period of history. That means that Malachi prophesied sometime after the rebuilding and dedication of the Temple in 516 A.D. So this prophecy regarding the day of the coming of the Lord meant another four-hundred to five-hundred years of waiting. That’s a long time to wait for the day when the promises of God finally come true. Such waiting calls for endurance. But let’s push this endurance further because we know the advent story. 

God sent John the Baptist as the messenger to prepare the way of the Lord. Yet his life ended with his head being chopped off. Then we also have the coming of the Lord too: Jesus, born in the town of Bethlehem. The birth of Jesus was such a joyous occasion that King Herod had every baby boy in Bethlehem murdered in an attempt to kill Jesus, who was a threat to Herod’s kingdom and fragile little ego. However, the story of Advent doesn’t end with the slaughter of baby boys in Bethlehem. Jesus grows up to be a man and after his baptism, he begins proclaiming the good news of God’s kingdom. So the promises of God proclaimed by Malachi, as well as the other prophets of Israel, are coming true but they are not as we anticipated. Instead, the kingdom of God for which the Lord’s people have hoped for and now are invited to participate comes by Jesus enduring death on a Roman cross—Crucifixion! This is the coming of the Lord.

The life that Advent calls us into is a faith measured by our endurance to wait for the coming of the Lord! Jesus comes but the fullness of his kingdom is still to come and so we, who believe, must continue waiting with endurance. Yet this can be a difficult aspect of having such faith.

There are some things in life that force us to either endure with patience or to give up our faith. I’m thinking of the different struggles we face, the grief and pain that life brings. Struggles with mental and emotional health just don’t go away because we say a prayer. Prayer matters but sometimes prayer is met with a long silence or even a resounding “No” just as Jesus experienced in the garden. We have other struggles too . . . struggles with sin, problems in our marriages or with our children, people we love who have died that we would like to just hug one more time. And the only thing we can do is wait with the patient endurance of faith, holding on to the hope that one day the peace of Christ will have delivered us from all these struggles.

Our faith is to not only say we believe but to wait, enduring the frustrations and disappointments and even suffering that comes from living between the coming of Christ. Such faith may seem naive and even blasé today but the righteousness of God will not fail. His peace, revealed in a baby named Jesus born to die on that old rugged cross but raised from death and exalted as Lord and Messiah, will one day come because this same Jesus is coming again. That’s the promise I’m holding on to and the promise I hope you hang on to as well.

 

A Sanctuary for Healing

I believe the church is the living portrait of what God is accomplishing in Christ. Simply put, the church is the artwork of God which depicts the new creation God is bringing about in Christ. As the church follows Jesus in embodying the gospel by means of doing good works. the church serves as God’s poetry in motion.

This embodiment of the gospel requires becoming honest with the truth. This honesty with the truth opens space for repentance, the letting go of the false narratives we have believed and receiving the truth revealed in Christ as the narrative we now participate within. As this happens, further space is opened for the church to be a community of healing, justice, and reconciliation, which is the embodied gospel.

So what might it be for a local church to be a community of healing? To answer this question, let’s recall the story of Jesus restoring the life of a dead man in Luke 7:11-17. The focus of the story seems to be the interaction between Jesus and the dead man’s mother, whom Luke also identifies as a widow. That’s an important detail because in her patriarchal society, she was depended on her son for economic survival and now that is gone. In the interaction, Luke tells us that 1) Jesus sees the woman, 2) he has “compassion for her,” and 3) he says to her “Don’t cry.” In other words, Jesus sees the circumstances of the woman and rather than ignoring her, he is moved to help her. To say it another way, full of compassion, Jesus acknowledged (validation) the predicament and despair of this woman in a manner that resulted in him showing her mercy.

In response to Jesus, Luke tells us that the crowd is overcome with awe or reverence for God, praising God. But why? Because Jesus had compassion for this widowed mother that moved him to care enough that he tended to her suffering before restoring the life of this dead man? Perhaps that’s part of the reason but it can’t be the entire reason. In the enchanted world that this healing is taking place, where secularism doesn’t exist, any form of healing or good is assumed to come from a god or gods. So that the crowd is now apparently praising Israel’s God is not a surprise. What is surprising is that the crowd knows, according to v. 16, “God has come to help his people.” Because of the compassion of Jesus, the people see God as a helper. The idea that this passage implies is that God actually comes to offer help and that is what healing is about. Healing is about being present with people, tending to their needs as a helper just like Jesus does.

This kind of healing makes us vulnerable because it requires us to open ourselves to others, which is always risky. Consider trying to comfort those who are grieving. There’s an article in Christianity Today that lists awkwardness, discomfort with our own mortality, and unrealistic expectations as the three reasons why Christians fail at times in helping those who grieve. That’s certainly understandable but we can bear this difficult burden if we’re honest with the truth revealed in Christ. Whether facing the haunting terror of not understanding why a young child has died or the discomfort of our own mortality because we have the truth — hope in Christ. Becoming vulnerable for the sake of others like this allow us to be a community of healing for those who are hurting.

So Jesus helps us reimagine what being a community of healing means. I want to end with three suggestions to remember that I believe will enable Christians to facilitate such healing:

1. Listen well and don’t attempt to theologize or defend God. God’s big enough that he doesn’t need us to defend him and if you remember the story of Job, it all went downhill when his friends opened their mouths and began to speculate about Job’s suffering.
2. Be willing to entire the pain of people, acting for their well-being. I need to say a word about prayer and healing. I believe in both prayer and healing but there is nothing in scripture that says God’s response to prayer and his healing excludes medical intervention, counseling, or any other sort of professional help. So when we encounter others who are sick or going through some emotional difficulties, a good way of helping might be offering to go with them to the doctor or counselor as support. Prayer is necessary but it seems rather simple and shallow to act as if prayer is all a person needs when their dealing with an illness, physical or mental.
3. Don’t judge or pour guilt and shame on people. Most people, in my experience, who are going though a divorce, struggling with addictions, and so on, already have enough guilt and shame as it is. They don’t need anyone to pile more on them. What they need is someone to remind them that God is here to help.

Few people, if any, make it through life, without encountering some struggles and pain. So while we desire, as local churches, to be a community of healing, we’ll need such a community of healing too. So be gracious, just as the Lord has been gracious to us.

Advent: Waiting With Hope

One of my favorite lines in the Psalter says “I was too troubled to speak” (Ps 77:4, NIV). It’s a line that has resonated with me for seventeen years, ever since that doctor in the emergency room pronounced Kenny dead. For I still know not the words that adequately describe losing my son.

In my lament, I ask how can it be that my son is dead? Why did God allow this child to be conceived and born only to die three days later? Where was God throughout those nine months as my wife and I prayed so fervently for the well-being of our son? Why did God not heal Kenny when the doctors were attempting to resuscitate him? Has God even heard my cries begging aloud for him to help my son? Yet God did not answer… Why?

Seventeen years later, I’ve certainly processed through these questions of lament. I seem to think I can answers them, at least in part, as abstract theological inquiries, though that offers little, if any, comfort. Perhaps I can even answer some of those questions in a pastoral manner that gets at the heart level.

Maybe.

But even then, these answers don’t assuage the grief and pain of such a loss like this. As a believer committed to following Jesus, all I am left with is the hope that one day God is making all things new. So I hope for the day of salvation when death will be no more, when the grief and pain is consumed in the fulfillment of redemption, when the tears and disappointment are gone, when the blessing of joy and peace are forever lived in the presence of the Lord, when the sting of death gives way to the victory that we will forever share in with the Lord.

This promise of hope is one of waiting. It is to look upon a distant bright star showing forth among clouds of darkness, with an anticipation veiled by tears. This is advent hope.

For four-hundred years after being exiled into Babylonian captivity ended, Israel waited for the day of the Lord. That’s four hundred years of waiting. At the time, they weren’t sure when that period of waiting would end and that is what makes waiting with hope so difficult.

The season of Advent is upon us again. We celebrate Advent knowing that the Lord has come. God came into our world in the person of Jesus, born as a baby destined to suffer a humiliating death on the cross so that he could take his life up again in resurrection and thereby save us all from the sting of death, our sins. While we have this assurance of hope, by faith we still wait for it as the day when salvation will be fully realized. Until then, what we have is hope. So we wait with hope.

Waiting with hope isn’t so easy. It’s never so easy and the hope we have doesn’t negate the darkness of silence that we live with as we wait. So what can we do? Wait! And don’t look pass the darkness by For as the great hymn Be Still, My Soul reminds us, the mystery of our hope is known as we wait in the darkness.

Be still, my soul when dearest friends depart
And all is darkened in the vale of tears
Then shalt thou better know His love His heart
Who comes to soothe thy sorrow and thy fears
Be still my soul the waves and winds shall know
His voice who ruled them while He dwelt below

I’m Not Renouncing My Faith

In recent weeks a couple of more popular Evangelical Christians have publicly renounced their Christian faith. In particular, I’m thinking of former pastor and author Joshua Harris as well as Hillsong Worship Leader Marty Sampson. Both seem to be struggling with the Christian faith as they understand it, though I’m not sure if that means they have completely abandoned belief in Jesus Christ or they’re just struggling with a lot of doubt right now. What I do know, based on what I have read, is that both are struggling with their faith.

My point isn’t to criticize or pass any judgment on anyone, including Joshua Harris and Marty Sampson, who struggle with doubts and even for a time may lose their faith. I’m just mentioning this to provide some context for this blog post. You see, I actually sympathize with those who struggle in their Christian faith because I have struggled in my Christian faith too. In fact there was a time during my seminary years, of all places, when I nearly walked away from this life of following Jesus because I wasn’t sure of what I believed anymore and I wasn’t even sure if it mattered.

The existential crisis for my own struggle with faith was the death of my first son, Kenny, followed by the death of my younger brother, John, a year later. Such suffering has haunted me. Not only did the death of my son and brother burden me with much grief and pain but my eyes began to see the suffering of others and the unfairness of it all. I remember well the afternoon I went to visit someone in the hospital battling cancer and walked through the pediatric oncology ward… Haunting!

The reality of suffering leaves me with many more faith questions than I have any satisfactory answers. Beyond that, as a pastoral-theologian, I know that life is much more complex than the fundamentalist Christian worldview some Evangelicals have. There are issues about creation and science, the end of time as well as God’s judgment, the nature of scripture, and so forth that I still wrestle with because some of the answers I have are not dogmatic absolutes. At least they’re not for me because the issue seem far too complex for such black and white solutions.

All that said, I still believe in Jesus. Even though there are questions for which I’m unsure of the answer, I still believe.

I still believe in the good news about Jesus, his death, burial, and resurrection, because I find the testimony about what happened to be believable. That is, I find the story of Jesus dying on the cross and being raised back to life (and bodily resurrection) to be reasonably credible. I’m not saying that this story is provable like one can prove the laws of gravity but I do think the story is credible, and therefore believable, just like the story of the American Civil War even though we weren’t alive to witness either event with our very own eyes.

What makes the story of Jesus believable is the evidence we have, the testimony that has been passed on from those who did see (cf. 1 Cor 15:1-8) and the effects what happened. While it might be possible that the story of Jesus was all just a ruse or some lie perpetuated by the early Christians, that possibilities loses their probability when considering the suffering of persecution many of these Christians endured. In one-hundred years time, from AD 25 to AD 125, history went from no existence of Christianity at all to a movement so numerous that some saw Christians as a new human race (N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, 359). This happened even though the believers didn’t have any legal standing and faced much opposition, including persecution and death. The only explanation is that what they believed about Jesus, his death, burial and resurrection, did really happen.

I also still believe in the good news of Jesus because of the hope that blossoms from such faith. The good news of Jesus is the story of how God overcomes sin and death, bringing about a new creation. Without that promise, our life ends in death so that all the suffering endured to that point is without any hope. Nihilism is what we are left with. As difficult as suffering is, it becomes utterly unbearable if life is nothing more than just “Life’s a bitch and then you die.”

As I said earlier, there are many questions about faith that I don’t always have satisfactory answers for but there is one thing I do know. If the story of Jesus being crucified and resurrected is true, and I believe there is credible reason for believing it is true, then it changes the course of history. The life Jesus lived, with all of his teaching, is the life that God is bringing into existence and it’s the life I want to participate in as a follower of Jesus. It’s a life lived by faith and a faith that’s big enough for and can co-exist with the questions and doubts we sometimes have.

So I’m not renouncing my faith and I pray you won’t either.

Remembering Kenny: God Spoke and Hope Emerged

After Kenny died, a dark cloud came over me that eventually appeared to snuff out any light.  Hope seemed dead and my faith in God was crumbling into ruins day by day.  There was two factors that added to this darkness.  One was another baby who had become critically ill but then became well again.  That is a good thing but for me, hearing people praise God for answering the prayers made on behalf of this baby only made me wonder all the more why God didn’t answer the prayers for Kenny.  The other factor was that a little over a year after Kenny’s death, my younger brother John also died.  He left behind a wife and two children.  It was just too much and yet, little did I know but an encounter with God was just around the corner.

This is the third part of the story: of how I discovered God again in a new way that brought a renewed faith and hope.  It is part of what makes me so passionate about the gospel of Jesus Christ and the hope it offers to a broken and hurting world.

I wish the process of healing was as linear as I am going to make it appear to be.   But that is just not how healing and renewed faith are discovered.  It tends to be a messy process that take different routes for every person.

For me, the road to healing begins with a wonderful community.  From the outset  Laura and I were surrounded by a very supportive family as well as friends from Harding University, Covenant Fellowship Church, and our Wednesday Evening Bible Study group.  I don’t know how many of those people had ever ministered to a people who had lost a child, but they were very caring and supportive in the way they treated us, listened to us, ministered to us, and so on.

I also had begun seminary at Harding School of Theology (HST).  In hind-site, I would not recommend beginning seminary right after losing a child but the community at HST also was helpful.  Over the year, as my faith continued to crumble, a couple of great things happened that kept steering me towards an encounter with God.

First, my wife and I did go through some grief counseling that was provided to us free of charge which did help my wife and I to practically help each other to grieve in more healthy ways.  Second, a friend of mine gave me a pocket knife that he had sharpened along with a story about the knife.  The story basically explained that he had bought the knife to pray for someone as he sharpened it and then God revealed to him that he was to be praying for me.  In some way, this all kept God in the picture even though God was becoming very fuzzy and frustrating.

One day I was sitting in chapel at HST and was just near the breaking point.  My brother had recently died and I was just tired.  On that particular day I heard the hymn Be Still, My Soul (see below) for the first time.  The song, which now is a favorite, eloquently expressed both the grief and pain I was reeling in as well as the hope I wanted so badly.

But hope seemed so illusive…perhaps impossible at that point.  I was tired.  I felt like a man lost in a dark cave with nothing but blackness.  I was just tired of walking in what seemed to be an endless journey of nothing but more darkness.

All I wanted to know was “Why?”  Why did my son die?  Why did God seemingly not answer the prayers?  Was he unable to or did he just not care too?  Did God even hear those prayers?  While Be Still, My Soul spoke of the hope I wanted to have, I was not even sure if there was a reason to hope in God.

As I said, I was tired and was ready to give up.  I had planned to quit seminary and even had been offered a job selling Honda cars.  But then I met John Mark Hicks, who would become both a friend and a Professor of mine.  He was speaking at HST on his own spiritual journey which included the death of his first wife and his son, Joshua, later on in life.  Despite his suffering, he spoke of a deep faith in God.  So I went up to him and asked him something about how he was able to trust in God.

What John Mark Hicks pointed me to was Romans 8:28 which says, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”  At first, I was sort of disappointed because far too many people had used this verse just to dismiss my grief and struggle without even taking the time to understand.  But I gave him the benefit of the doubt since he understood what I was going through.  John Mark Hicks told me to go home and read, to learn what that “good” is about.  So that night after Laura went to bed, I pulled out my Bible and began reading through Romans, reading again through Romans, and reading, and…

At some point God spoke.  Not in audible words but nevertheless I heard God speak and he said, “Rex, my good is your redemption and if you’ll trust me, I will see that good to the end even if you don’t understand how I work that all out.”  And just like that the light began to break through the darkness, hope began to emerge.  It was like a thousand pounds being lifted from my shoulders.  I no longer needed to understand or have an answer to the question of “why?” to all my questions and yet, I found myself able to trust God again.

Ten years later I am a person full of hope.  I believe God is redeeming the world in Jesus Christ, making all things new (cf. Rev 21:5) and that includes us…you…me.  I don’t understand everything about how that is happening and there are things about God which are remain mystery.  I’m ok with that.  I wish Kenny was still alive and would give almost anything to hold him just one more time.  I cannot contemplate the thought of embracing Kenny in the new heaven and new earth without some tears of joy.  Further more, as terrible as it has been to lose a son, God has used this journey to give me a faith and hope that I did not have before.  For that, I am thankful.

Thank you for reading this story, a story about Kenny and I.  But most importantly, a story about God.

*****

The following video is of the choral group Libera singing the hymn Be Still, My Soul set to a video with images of the Holocaust.

*****

See also part 1 and 2 of this “Remembering Kenny” trilogy:

• Part 1: The Joy of My Son’s Life
• Part 2 :God, Where Were You?

Remembering Kenny: God, Where Were You?

In yesterday’s post, The Joy of My Son’s Life, I recalled the life that Kenny did live, sharing some of the great memories I have of his life.  With this post I want to share the dark and difficult part of the story, Kenny’s death.

The day was Friday, August 2, 2002.  Laura and I brought Kenny home believing he was as healthy as a healthy baby could be.  Obviously that was not the case.  About an hour later Kenny suddenly stopped breathing.  911 was called and EMS came, taking Kenny immediately to a local trauma center.  Laura and I quickly followed and were eventually joined at the trauma center by many friends, who all were praying for Kenny.

Then, about an hour later, after exhausting every means to resuscitate Kenny with no avail, out came the doctor.  His words were shattering.  I remember them like they were yesterday.  “I’m sorry, we have pronounced your son dead.”

And with those eight simple words, a darkness came over me that would remain for nearly a year and a half.

The doctors did allow Laura and I to come in and hold our son, or his body, one last time.  Laura did not stay long but I couldn’t leave.  My son was gone.  And all of those prayers…where did they go.  Where was God when my son was dying?  How can this be happening?  Is this really happening?

I never doubted the existence of God and as strange as it may sound, seeing my son’s lifeless body only enhance my belief in God’s existence.  You see, life is not simply a matter of biology.  While all people are physical specimens, we all have an “image” which makes us uniquely human with all of our beauty and goodness as God’s creation.  That was gone, missing from my son’s lifeless body.  Did that just appear by accident or was it the image of God, created by God?

I was convinced that Kenny’s life – from the miracle of his birth (all births are miracles, are they not?) to the beauty that made him uniquely Kenny, that gave him glory and honor (cf. Ps 8:5) – was evidence of God’s existence.  But where was God when we needed him the most, when Kenny needed him the most?

That first night after Kenny’s death, I was awakened from my sleep due to my crying.  The anguish was so great that my stomach began to crap up as though it was being tied into knots and I had trouble catching my breath.  I remember asking “why?” when my son was so innocent…he didn’t deserve this.

The question of why began haunting me.  What happened to all of those prayer’s for Kenny that Laura and I and many other had prayed?  Did God hear them?  Did they matter to God?  Such questions crippled my faith because I could not resolve the tension that these unanswered questions left with all of my grief and pain.

It was difficult to carry on while trying to believe that there was any reason to have hope.  Yet to remain in that place of such darkness was to accept that life was hopeless and that seemed even more unbearable.

In tomorrow’s post I will share how discovered hope and had my faith renewed.  But for now, I want to recognize the importance of this place in the journey.  It has been ten years since Kenny’s death and I still do not have the answer to many of my “why” questions.  That is, I don’t know why Kenny died, just as I don’t know why suffering exists (and I’m skeptical of those who so easily claim to know).  However, when people endure such tragedies, this stepping into the darkness with the deep questions of faith is so necessary and acceptable if we are to discover faith and hope again.  For in between that Friday when Jesus was crucified and that Easter Sunday when he was resurrected is a very long and dark  Saturday, when the prayer of “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Ps 22:1; Mk 15:34) is met with the silence of God.

In that moment, I had to step forward in trying to find God in all of this.  I was scared as I did not want to lose my faith and yet I felt like I had very little faith. Even worse, the more I stepped forward the more the haunting the darkness seemed as the questions came with me.  However, in looking back ten years afterwards, I can say that when in darkness , if we will have the faith to step into that darkness then we will reach that place where the darkness gives way to The Light.

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This video is of the song “Can You Here Me?” by Mark Schultz.  Although the song was written about a mother and father who’s child was sick with cancer, the song captures exactly how I felt after Kenny’s death.

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See also part 1 and 3 of this “Remembering Kenny” trilogy:

• Part 1: The Joy of My Son’s Life
• Part 3: God Spoke and Hope Emerged