Recently, I found myself facing an unpleasant and uncomfortable situation. While the situation itself was not new to me, on this particular day, I became aware of my effort to assign judgment or blame for this situation when it was unwarranted. In coming into that awareness, I had to deal with a difficult truth: we must be careful about judging circumstances, as unpleasant circumstances are not always someone's fault. Sometimes, we have to just deal with rain.
How many of us can recall an experience when your parents called you and/or your siblings to go to them, and they used a stern or serious voice to do so? Let's go further. Let's say that we were guilty of some mischief, or perhaps we left some task undone or did it incompletely. Perhaps there was an argument going on between siblings, and we're concerned that we're about to be punished. In the context of the parental call, we may begin to blame ourselves for doing something wrong (or half-doing), or begin bickering with siblings, blaming them for causing us all to get in trouble.
Standing in front of the parents, we feel anxious or guilty, we may feel dread about what is coming; whatever the myriad of emotions, they tend to be negative. However, when the parents state why they called us, it turned out to be for something good, something totally unrelated to what we were thinking. We were dreading the worst, condemning our siblings, cursing our insufficiency, and we did it all for nothing and based on nothing but our imagination!
We know that, per Matthew 7:1-2 that we should not judge one another. This tends to be a difficult skill to master. But a corollary to this exhortation is that we must also be careful of judging circumstances, especially those that arise suddenly in our personal lives.
Perhaps you are familiar with the Biblical story of Job, and how God allowed Satan to severely test him. Perhaps you are also familiar with Job's friends who came to visit him. They came to see him and to comfort him as we'd expect any friends worth their salt to do given the circumstances. But, quickly, we discover that his friends, in their struggle to deal with the overwhelming circumstances that Job was enduring, were unable to simply accept that the situation was just awfully bad, painful, and lasting for an indefinite period. They were unable to admit that they had no idea why this had happened to Job, and just be there with him, regardless of why it happened. Their unease with this unpleasant reality sent them down a familiar train of thought given their limited understanding of God. In short, the sentiment was, "Surely, you had to have done something, Job! God wouldn't do/allow such a miserable and painful ordeal for nothing!" Of course, from their perspective, this is exactly what God did!
Job was not at fault! In fact, God Himself lauded Job, saying that "there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil." Even Job knew, in spite of the onslaught of criticism he received, that what was happening to him was not necessarily due to any fault of his own. We can even forgive him for feeling frustrated and exasperated while in the throes of such arduous trials, frustration compounded by the unwarranted criticism.
Job's understanding of the circumstances was vastly different than that of his friends. They were forced to see a different facet of the Working of God, and that view challenged them to give up their relatively simplistic cause-and-effect view of God. If the truth be told, we, too, are being called to do the same, i.e. to give up a simplistic, even childish view of God.
One of the most revered prophetic utterances is also one whose implications are so apropos for this context. It is found in Isaiah 55:
[8] For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, saith the LORD.
[9] For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts.
Intellectually, we understand that this is certainly true. Some of us end up with crossed eyes when we consider trigonometry or calculus, let alone how the stars in the Cosmos stay on their courses in the sky. But, for some reason, when faced with unexplainable, difficult or unpleasant real life challenges, we sometimes find it difficult to accept them without having to assign blame or fault.
We have a strong urge to make something be wrong or bad when we are uncomfortable.
For example, many people think that rain is bad because it gets us wet and cold, it makes traffic worse, it curtails many recreational activities, it messes up our hair, etc. But, many people find the sound of rain to be comforting and peaceful. Rain cleans the air, rain waters the plants, rain replenishes rivers and aquifers, rain extinguishes forest fires, rain cools the heat of the day. Just because rain (or whatever) can make us uncomfortable doesn't necessarily make it bad or wrong!
Our compulsion to make a thing bad leads to a predictable train of thought: the bad thing has cause, and we must root out that cause (i.e. that person). There is always a why, but we won't always be able to discover it; and, in truth, in many cases, the why does not matter! Do we have to know why the oppressor oppresses in order to comfort and help the oppressed?
Even more poignant than this is the fact that our limited perspective often makes our judgment of our situation incomplete or incorrect. How many times have we arrived at some conclusion about why a thing happened, only to discover that we were missing some key detail, or were altogether wrong?
In some cases, there is a cause that we can discern, and we are right and just in seeking to fix a problem or correct an error. However, in many cases, the cause of an event or circumstance is beyond us, and it behooves us to accept it. By accept, I don't mean that we like it or don't work to change it (as possible or appropriate), but instead accept as in, "It already is." In truth, we usually don't have to understand how a thing came to be in order to accept it; and we can respond to it properly only when we accept what is.
By accept, it doesn't mean that you don't feel what you feel, especially in a moment of challenge. But, it does challenge us to not rush and ascribe meaning (and fault/blame) to unpleasant circumstances. Sometimes, we find, as Joseph exhorted his brothers, "ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good..."
Sometimes, God won't change the circumstance until the circumstance changes us!
In truth, this may be why these unexpected, illogical, unpleasant things sometimes happen to us. Indeed, we often find that some of life's biggest challenges turned out to be life's biggest blessings merely concealed in the wrapping paper of trials and tribulations.
As it has been said, "God is less interested in making us comfortable than He is in making us conformable." It is less important to be comfortable, to be right, to make another (or a situation) wrong; but let us allow God to work His Work, and seek to learn something along this journey. Let us strive to follow the example of Genesis 1, "Let it be, and so it is," and then come to know that, at some level, "that, which is, is good!"
