I can't think of a more insidious, evil than cancer. Rarely, is it's presence not tragic and unexpected. It creeps in during the dark of the night and steals your loved ones away. Is it me or does it always feel like the jack-asses of this world could smoke 50 packs a day of cigarettes from the age of 2 and get away with a clean chest x-ray at 90, while those rare kind souls who the world is blessed with to a much lesser degree are taken from us in car wrecks, cancer, and all kinds of random tragic events that Edgar Allen Poe couldn't even think up. One of my good friends in residency was just diagnosed with a rare form of breast cancer...if you spend long in medicine you'll learn that the words "rare" and "interesting" are not words that you want associated with your disease. Yet again it couldn't have happened to a more undeserving person. Why can't the child abusers of this world be struck by these things instead of good people, like my friend Mindy?
I haven't read the whole bible, probably not close to half and it's probably a huge hypocrisy that I'm speaking of it, but there's one book that I've read and obsessed over since I was a little kid, The book of Job. Why would God put someone through such horrible things? In the end, I finally realized the message of the book (the message to me anyway) isn't that God has a plan (which I believe he does), the message is that God is too complex for you to understand and trying to see or figure out the plan is like an ant trying to read advanced calculus, it's too ridiculous to even attempt. That book's message to me is to quit looking for the plan and to try and walk the road he lays down directly in front of you, that in itself is hard enough. In a way, it's relieving to give up control and let him steer...in the back of my mind I ask myself, "Even if he steers you off a cliff?"...and somehow I'm still comforted...I guess, at the very least, I'm not driving off the cliff by myself. (which could happen easy enough if you've ever seen me drive)
Newbie Doc
A verse that has helped me with the "when bad things happen to good people" issue is Isaiah 55:8-9 "For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways," declares the Lord. "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts." I also like this quote from Albert Einstein which I read on Ann Clawson's blog when he was interviewed for the Saturday Evening Post way back in 1929. "I'm not an atheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in a position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they were written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws." And also the Apostle Paul's quote from 1 Corinthians 13:12 "For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I shall know fully just as I also have been fully known."
ReplyDelete