Readers’ Choice (originally published September 25, 2014)

“I love this post because it both affirms and convicts me. The first half vindicates my intuition that life is irreducibly complex and that reductionistic ways of thinking about God are likely to be wrong. Yet the second half reveals how difficult it is to rest in the ‘happy ending of God’s story’ in the face of everyday disappointments.” — Scott

Psalm 77:9-10
Has God forgotten to be gracious? Has he in anger shut up his compassion? Then I said, “I will appeal to this, to the years of the right hand of the Most High.”

Elisabeth Elliot , Through Gates of Splendor (1957), Epilogue II (1996)
There is always the urge to oversimplify, to weigh in at once with interpretations that cannot possibly cover all the data or stand up to close inspection. We know, for example, that time and again in the history of the Christian church, the blood of martyrs has been its seed. So we are tempted to assume a simple equation here. Five men died. This will mean x-number of Waorani Christians.

Perhaps so. Perhaps not. Cause and effect are in God’s hands … God is God. I dethrone him in my heart if I demand that he act in ways that satisfy my idea of justice … There is unbelief, there is even rebellion, in the attitude that says, ‘God has no right to do this to five men unless …’

Those men had long since given themselves without reservation to do the will of God … For us widows, the question as to why the men who had trusted God to be both shield and defender could be allowed to be speared to death was not one that could be smoothly or finally answered in 1956, not yet silenced in 1996 …

I believe with all my heart that God’s Story has a happy ending … But not yet, not necessarily yet. It takes faith to hold on to that in the face of the great burden of experience, which seems to prove otherwise. What God means by happiness and goodness is a far higher thing than we can conceive …

The massacre was a hard fact, widely reported at the time, surprisingly well remembered by many even today. It was interpreted according to the measure of one’s faith or faithfulness–full of meaning or empty. A triumph or a tragedy. An example of brave obedience or a case of fathomless foolishness … But the danger lies in seizing upon the immediate and hoped-for, as though God’s justice is thereby verified …

A healthier faith seeks a reference point outside of all human experience, the Polestar which marks the course of all human events, not forgetting that impenetrable mystery of the interplay of God’s will and man’s … We are sinners. And we are buffoons … It is not the level of our spirituality that we can depend on. It is God and nothing less than God, for the work is God’s and the call is God’s and everything is summoned by him and to his purposes …