Let's be honest. Most of us function on a daily basis like Lucy VanPelt. Oh we say we believe something else, but our theology has not caught up with our internal wiring. My wife recently re-read one of our favorite novels, Peace Like a River, by Leif Enger. On the whiteboard in the hallway just outside our bathroom, she wrote a quote from this novel. "Fair is whatever God wants to do." I agree with that statement on the meta level, but what about the daily-ness of my life? I find myself agreeing more with that great theologian Calvin than I do the character in Enger's novel:
I want life to be fair as long as it is fair in my favor. As long as things go along in a direction I desire, I think life is fair and I trust that God knows what He is doing. But just let a circumstance come into my life, or a season of life take turns I hadn't planned on, and suddenly I am in Lucy and Calvin's camp. It's only fair when my life turns out the way I wanted and it's unfair when life isn't unfair in my favor.
This tendency in all of us is one of the many reasons why God keeps repeating Himself throughout Scripture, "You're going to have to trust me, I know what I'm doing."---SLP version (Schliep loose paraphrase version) This does not come naturally to me or to you. It comes super-naturally. It is something that is "above natural." Jesus perfectly followed the will of God and yet it is appeared that, as he hung on the cross, God must have forsaken him. If ever things were happening that were "not fair" in light of the character of the person involved, it was this event in the life of Jesus. It is, in fact, this apparent unfairness that prompted Jesus' quotation from Psalm 22, "My Elohim [strong God who is able to deliver], my Elohim, why have you forsaken me?" What the psalmist goes on to write (and what I think Christ was pointing to by using the opening phrase) is that God had not, actually, forsaken him. In fact, God was very much present, even in the suffering. Part way throught his song there is a shift from a prayer for deliverance to an acknowledgment that God has delivered, or at least will deliver. "...You have rescued me from the horns of the wild oxen! I will tell of your name to my brothers; in the midst of the congregation I will praise you: You who fear YHWH [the promise-making, promise-keeping God who is to His people all that He is], praise him! All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him, and stand in awe of him, all you offspring of Israel! For he has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted, and he has not hidden his face from him, but has heard, when he cried to him."---Psalm 22:21-24 (ESV)
I don't know what this season holds for you, but I believe, deep down and contrary to the apparent evidence, that Leif Enger's character got it right. "Fair is whatever God wants to do." Now if I could just trust Him enough to live like I believe it... Lord I believe, help my unbelief.
