Should We Fire God? (Part 3b-3)

Building the list
In the last post, we asked the questions of how far should God go to restrict our pain and suffering.  If we were to build a list, what would it look like and when would it end?

Continuing on page 67, “The big problem for the person who makes that list really isn’t where you start, but where you stop. In a world where pain is constrained, what pain is allowable? Any ? None? This really starts to get tricky. The cancer can be removed, but what kind of life will be left afterward?”

He then goes on to discuss some of the purposes of pain with an example from his life, similar to the ones I alluded to above about pain being good in some circumstances for the short term and more often long term well being of our body and its constituent parts.

Jumping to page 69, “But let’s get back to serious issues – the end of our list. What about intentional pain we cause or feel as a result of someone else’s actions? Does God just take over our bodies to keep us from harming someone in anger? What would that make us if he did?... Our freedom requires our being able to hurt and to be hurt. Our freedom to make any decision at all seems to require our being able to make terrible ones too.

Even if we could just eliminate intentional harm, how many of us have been hurt unintentionally? A breakup, a word said by someone in anger, a simple mistake. How about those times when we believed that we were wronged, only to later find out that wasn’t the case? An inaccurately perceived wrong can hurt as badly as an actual one.

Should God take over at those points as well? Should he prohibit the break up that we desperately did not want to happen? Where would that put the one who needs it to end? Does that person’s pain not matter because our pain matters more?

Or what about the pain that causes us to make a decision that works for our good?... What about all the powerful contributions of normal people in the world that started with the simple thought I will never allow that to happen again? What, if any, pain do we consider allowable?... Would we ever grow tired of being pleasant robots?...

For now it would seem that God has chosen a much more personally painful path: no easy answers and no quick removal of all suffering. But no avoiding it for him either. Perhaps this is the clearest way he resembles an oncologist. As painful as our experience with cancer of our souls is, at some point it ends and we are able to move on. Not so for God. Just as the oncologist faces cancer in the lives of different people every day, God faces our pain constantly as well. The reality is that the God who created the universe is suffering right here with us. Right now.

The infection cost him the life of his Son.

Maybe he isn’t turning his back on anything or anyone. Maybe he isn’t a sullen superhero turning a deaf ear to our cries for help. Maybe he just sees the complexity that we miss. The Scriptures say that even though he cannot remove the horror of sin right now, that when the time is right, he will. For now he walks with us through our lives. And his grief is as real as ours.“ Should We Fire God? (page 69 – 71)

The implied recipients of the eventual and final removal of all pain and suffering and hence sin, after physical death, are those that are called to God through faith in Jesus Christ.

Vantage point
Prior to reading this book, my cynicism towards God’s ‘job performance’ as Jim puts it, had been increasingly growing. This was growing in part due to my (failed) attempts at reconciling the stark differences I saw between the God of the OT with the God of the NT. I began questioning God’s motives for his actions more and more. Each successive question (over time) exposed more and more just how cynical of God’s actions I had become, namely those as seen in the OT and from experience in today’s world of suffering. Both the things he had commanded to do as well as his lack of action both in history and today really started to bother me. Many of these actions and commands in the OT began to look quite immoral, and what I saw today was his restraint in letting ‘all hell break loose’ upon people for which he was said to love.

I would like to wrap up the remainder of this post with a story from Jim’s life about his child Noah.

“Baseball for Noah started out very well, much better than it had for me. Things were looking good. Then about halfway through the season the wheels started coming off the cart. He had a couple of strikeouts in a row – frustrating, but normal for almost everyone. But the next game he struck out every time he went to the plate.

He didn’t hit the ball again that season.

I remember the feelings; the nervous look on his face was the same one I remembered having. The eyes that were mostly closed instead of being wide open to watch the ball. The bat that shot out to where you were hoping the ball would be instead of making a smooth arc to where it was. Getting angry at yourself for swinging wide when you shouldn’t, then while you were still angry watching a perfect strike come floating in right after it while your bat stayed on your shoulder. I remember all of it. And I was watching the storm build on his face.

One game, it just became too much. He finally broke down in anger and frustration and embarrassment, and his team saw him break. And he knew it.

I walked behind the dugout when it was time for him to take right field. He looked up and begged me not to make him go out there. He just wanted to go home. He was hot and tired and embarrassed and why couldn’t we just leave? And I was right back at Jackson Street feeling the exact same feelings.

I was a buddy with his coach; I could have pulled him out. The coach would have understood; everyone would have. And in that moment, all I wanted to do was rescue him and get him out of there. I wanted to help him stop feeling the horrible stuff that I so very well remembered. And as I looked down at my son, his face red with the heat and frustration, I realized something.

I absolutely could not do it.

So many times as parents, we have to go with our gut. Scripture gives us some guidance, but God (not surprisingly) was wise enough to know that the approach to parenting would need to adjust to the times in which the parents and children were living. So Scripture handles parenting mostly from a principle standpoint, more of the way you approach things and less of what you do here, here, and here. So I pray a lot for a God-guided, faith-filled gut. And in that moment, I felt I heard from God clearly and specifically.

Noah needed to go out into the outfield with his team. And I had to tell him.

Putting Power Aside
In that moment, I had all the power in the world to control that situation. I could make it easier for Noah – even make it easier for myself. As much as I hated that part of my life, I would have traded with him in a second if I could have. But I couldn’t. As embarrassed as he was, as frustrated and angry and disappointed and hot and ready to leave as he was, he needed to stay. There was much more going on in that moment than he had any idea about. And I was responsible for the fact that I knew what it was.

I knew I wouldn’t be able to exercise the power in the situation that I had available to me. Noah had to learn the importance of keeping his commitments, of not giving into fear and embarrassment, of trying as hard as he could even when those attempts didn’t result in the outcomes he was looking for. He had to learn that even when you desperately don’t want to take the field, if you have said you will, you do it. Most important, he needed to see that he could.

So, on that day, to use all the power I had available to me would have been selfish. It would have made us both feel better, but some lessons can only be learned with stinging eyes on the way to right field.

A Little Bit of an Idea
Out of nowhere, in that moment I got just the smallest sense of what it might be like to be God. That God might feel the way I felt that day behind that dugout, with someone I loved more than I could describe getting sadder and angrier at me and realizing he needed to continue to walk down the path that had caused him pain. To have the power to remove the struggle, but knowing the removal isn’t in the best interest of the child, is a painful place to be. Making decisions based on a larger right is always tougher. But sometimes it is unavoidable.

The point here is not whether I did the right thing in that moment or not. Neither is it just that it pains the heart of God to allow difficulty to get to us that he would rather, in a (literally) perfect world, restrain. The real issue here is the response from Noah. He didn’t get what my goals were and if he did, he certainly was on the side of reaching them a different way. As I said before, he didn’t understand what he didn’t understand. From his vantage point, a loving father would behave differently. If he were a father, he would behave differently. It was a very straightforward issue from where he was sitting. We should go. We could handle the other stuff in other ways. But right now, in the moment, we should head home…

…we can understand only parts of God. He has made himself knowable to us through the Scriptures and through the experiences people have had with him across time. We get to know God through truly giving ourselves to and appreciating his creation – not looking to use any part of it selfishly, but seeing every part of it as a divine signpost pointing us back to him.

But even then, we can get only part of him. We will never be able to understand the fullness of God’s thoughts, concerns, and plans. At least not while we are living on a broken planet…

… This being said, if we don’t get him, then we also don’t get the larger picture that he is moving us toward. Just as surely as Noah didn’t see what I was up to that day in the field, we don’t get what God is up to on a daily basis. Just as surely as Noah’s lack of understanding made him angry with me, our lack of understanding of what God is fully up to can make us angry with him. And just as surely as I still needed to respond to the larger pictures that I knew brought risk of Noah’s anger, God must do the same. And the risk is large.” Should We Fire God? (page 98-103)

Going from here
From reading this story, coupled with the rest of the text, I began to see that perhaps my vantage point was skewed. Maybe I was wrong. Just maybe. Once one can consider that just maybe they have a partial vantage point that is giving them an incomplete or even skewed picture of God, then there is hope for that person to be proved wrong.

Alas, perhaps God is not just “the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” – Richard Dawkins

While these are the major points that came across to me, I would recommend picking up this good read to experience the interweaved stories, illustrations, frustrations, and the like that will give a more complete picture of what Jim is painting. This will prove to strengthen the believers view and trust in the God of the Bible as well as (hopefully) present some points of reflection and doubt in the non-believer as well as perhaps the believer struggling with these same issues of pain and suffering. This will no doubt be an ongoing dialogue throughout my entire life.


Should We Fire God? series:
Part 1
Part 2a
Part 2b
Part 3a
Part 3b-1
Part 3b-2
Part 3b-3



** I would like to extend my gratitude towards the author, Jim Pace, for allowing me to publish the longer excerpts above from his book “Should We Fire God?” as well as for this work that has helped expose cracks and holes in my cynicism leading to some reversals and questioning of my previous attitude(s) towards God’s ‘job performance’.