Does Anyone Know Where The Love Of God Goes?

The search for something good in suffering

It began days after I came home from my seventy-three day hospitalization.  Covid’s devastation had me at death’s door for part of that time, and when I woke up after weeks of unconsciousness I was shocked at the damage to my body.  Though being released from the hospital meant I was going to make it for at least awhile, my health was radically altered.  And so, a few days after I was home, I began to listen to a song I knew from years past, a song by Gordon Lightfoot entitled “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”  Lightfoot had been one of my favorites, and in the past I had always had a strange attraction to this particular song.  But now I listened to it intently, repeatedly, waiting to hear the verse that raised the question pounding in my heart:  “Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?”

A little background is in order.  Lightfoot wrote the folk ballad to keep alive a memory.  In 1975 one of the largest freighters on the Great Lakes left on a journey from Wisconsin carrying tons of iron pellets bound for Detroit.  On the second day of the journey the ship was caught in a violent storm that ultimately sank the ship, costing the lives of all 29 crew members.  Lightfoot was so moved by the account and subsequent investigation that he wrote this song, something of a documentation of what had taken place.

Few people thought the song would become a hit, though it did and became one of Gordon Lightfoot’s best known.  More importantly, the lyrics picture the passing hours on the ship, the increasing dread and feeling of doom, the certainty of death.  And there, reflecting what Lightfoot believed those sailors were likely thinking, we find these words – “Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?”  When the unthinkable happens, when the nightmare overwhelms, when the pain does not end, when we are about to go down, where in the world is God’s love?

I will warn you now that this will be but part one of several blogs, for this single quote has captured much of what I felt when this season of my life began, and I still find it haunting.  The questions about how God loves, why He doesn’t choose to intervene at times when we need Him most, bounced around in my mind.  I am not alone, so let me share a few quotes I have kept in my files long before the trauma happened in my own life.

Words from Peter Van Inwagen in his book, Christian Faith and the Problem of Evil: “Angels may weep because the world is filled with suffering.  A human being weeps because his daughter, she and not another, has died of leukemia this very night, or because her village, the only world she knows, is burning and the mutilated bodies of her husband and her son lie at her feet.”

A letter from a friend sent to Randy Alcorn, printed in his book If God Is Good: “When I was admitted to the hospital with sepsis with a 50/50 chance of survival, I asked the chaplain how we could believe God is love when this felt like the antithesis of love.  I said I wouldn’t inflict this much suffering on someone I hated, let alone someone I loved.  She told me she would ‘look it up,’ then left my room and never came back.  I posed the same question to the social worker who came to visit me a few days later.  She told me that God’s like a giant and we’re like little ants, and sometimes He accidently steps on our ant hills and some of us get hurt.  She said our suffering is random and God’s probably not even aware of it.”

There are these words found in Habakkuk 1:2-3, “How long, O Lord, must I call for help, but you do not listen?  Why do you make me look at injustice?  Why do you tolerate wrong?”

Add to that the words of Psalm 22:1-2, words echoed even from the lips of Jesus on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?  Why are you so far from saving me, so far from the words of my groaning?”

And though I could add many others, let me give a final quote from Joni Eareckson Tada, reflecting on more than forty years in a wheelchair, “I’ve learned that suffering is messier than I once thought.”

Yes, it is.  Where does the love of God go in such times?

My first remembered encounter with sudden, painful loss came when I was in elementary school.  I was friends with a boy named Randy and was often at his house, so often that the family more or less treated me like one of their own.  I especially liked Randy’s dad Carl.  I remember Carl giving me the first job I was ever paid for, a quarter to help his other kids dig a footing for a building.  When Carl lined up his kids for their regular haircut, I was there in the lineup, the characteristic shaving of my head but leaving bangs in the front. Carl was a good man who, one day on his way home from work, fell asleep and drove into the back of gravel truck, killing him instantly.  I couldn’t understand it, I couldn’t even catch my breath, and I hurt so for the family.  And, at least as well as I can remember now, I uttered those words heavenward, “Why God?”

There would be other times.  My Uncle Harold who, among other things, gave me my first car, a worn out Studebaker that I was able to squeak out another 20,000 miles before I wrecked it.  His heart failed him just as he had decided to take early retirement, ending his life and any plans he had for the future.  And there was also my brother Larry, a father of five, a brilliant man who, in his thirties, started having headaches and falling sleep on the job.  The diagnosis?  Brain cancer – he went through chemo and radiation and whatever else they could throw at him, and though he lived a few years, the prayers for healing were not answered, and he died, leaving behind those kids and a wife and lots of questions.

I could go on – not only in my own life but in my years as a pastor.  I never realized the depth of pain and sorrow I would encounter in the lives of those God called me to serve, and I frequently was at a loss for words and, at times, desperate in my prayers for others.  And though I can tell you that I saw many good things, many answers to prayer, many times the suffering ended and joy returned, I also had those times where I echoed the unspoken (and sometimes spoken) question of those whose hearts were broken – does anyone know where the love of God goes?

If you are a regular reader of my blogs you will likely discern a turn in this blog.  I think there has to be, for me and for you.  I return to Psalm 22, where the person praying asks, “God, why have you turned your back on me” – and then he does not stop praying.  The Psalm is long, the first part filled with pain, and echoes of what Jesus would go through on the cross capture our attention.  But other things should too.  I am especially struck by the Psalmist words in verses 9-11, words that make it clear that God had been taking care of him all his life, even from his mother’s womb – why has He stopped now? Commentator Ellen Charry says it is as if the Psalmist is insinuating that it is God’s job to take care of him, it is something God should do.  God seems to be shirking His responsibility!  Psalm 121:4 says God does not slumber nor sleep, and so, as Charry puts it, God’s watch does not end at midnight and start at dawn – no, this is a 24 hour 7 day a week job!

And yet… what is the Psalmist doing in Psalm 22?  Complaining, struggling, overwhelmed, suffering, yes.  But mostly, he is praying.  Deep down he still believes what I believed when Covid changed my life, that even in the midst of all that had taken place, God’s providential care was still intact, His love was still in place, and He had not turned away even as the waves of troubles turned minutes into hours into months and even years.

If you would look at my personal library you would discover many books that deal with this kind of thing.  Making sense of the bad things that happen in our lives, wondering where God is when the unthinkable happens.  I accumulated and read those books in part because I wanted to understand better, but also because I wanted to walk better with my church family during those painful times.  In 2010 I even led a Sunday night study that stretched into five months entitled Light Into Darkness:  Making Sense of Evil, Suffering, and the Mysterious God.  I probably had the largest attendance of any of the studies I had led, and it stretched into five months because of the questions those attending raised.  I have the notebook of the handouts I gave along with all of my thoughts at the time, and I wondered if in this post-Covid season of my life I would still agree with what I said and believed back in 2010.  The answer would be yes, mostly, but more nuanced, more seasoned, and I think, leaving more questions unanswered. 

When I began writing these blogs back in June of 2023 (by the way, this is my 23^rd blog), I asked my son Chad what he thought this was all about, how would he categorize these writings.  He said I was sharing a personal theodicy.  That may be a strange word to some, but basically a theodicy is a defense of God in the face of evil.  A lot of technical arguments and explanations have been given through the years as to how a good, powerful God could allow such evil and pain to exist, and through the years both in my own studies and my academic training I have spent a lot of time on the question.  But what I have been writing in these blogs is personal – it is how I feel, what I believe, how I am coping, and how I understand God’s hand in our lives during times like these.  And though at first I thought I would just tell my own story, my own pastoral instincts kicked in.  You would not know this but my family does – when I retired from ministry and was filled with despair I said to them, “I don’t know what I am anymore.  I don’t know if I am still a pastor.”  The truth of the matter is that, though God had released me from my pastorate, He had not withdrawn my calling.  I just didn’t know what to do with it.  But as I began to write this series of blogs I began to see these pages as a way to care for others, be a pastor to others, someone who can be candid enough and vulnerable enough to help others on their journey during dark or difficult times.  This personal theodicy is very much a pastoral theodicy as well.

So, back to the question – where does the love of God go?  And along with that, what good can come from suffering?  You have already seen what I believe in my past blogs, that God’s love doesn’t go anywhere, it remains with us, that He is Immanuel, God with us.  But we need to go a bit deeper, and so I will begin writing next time about some of the defenses of God in the face of evil, starting with the idea that God has crafted this world in such a way that its hardships and heartaches can shape our souls.

But for now… when those times come when the minutes do turn to hours and you wonder where the love of God goes, go ahead and pray a Psalm 22 prayer.  Yes, we often tie this Psalm in with the crucifixion of Jesus, and for good reason.  As early Christians tried to make sense of the cross, this Psalm became prophetic for them, picturing the kind of suffering Jesus experienced for us.  But initially this Psalm was the prayer of a troubled soul, one suffering as a result of what life was throwing at him.  A variety of strong images are presented, frightening descriptions of those who brought him sorrow.  Such portrayals can be given about the moments in life that have thrown us into despair, monstrous nightmares of loss, vicious illnesses that have destroyed our flesh, wild beasts that have robbed us of health.  Take a cue from this Psalm, when the terrifying waves change minutes to hours and you wonder where the love of God has gone, pray your complaint just as the Psalmist does.  Make it graphic, expressive of all the emotion within you.

But then do what the Psalmist did – remember.  Remember how God has been trustworthy in the past.  Remember how God has been faithful to our ancestors – they too had their pain and agony, their heartbreaking losses, and yet they continued to hang in there, continued to pray, go to church, sing praise.  Spend time remembering those moments in your own life and the life of those you have known and loved.  Let such a memory remind you that the God who has been faithful in the past will be faithful now.

And as you are remembering, call to mind the fact that Jesus prayed these very words, Jesus shouted His “Why” from the cross too!  If Jesus prayed such a prayer, it is understandable that we feeble followers will find times we need to do the same.  And while you are prayerfully reflecting about all of that, recall the words of Romans 8:35-39, that because God gave His Son, the One who shouted out our prayer, we are told that nothing that this life can throw at us will separate us from God’s love.  He is present with us even in the darkest hours of life. Just like the Psalmist discovered as his anguished prayer turned to praise, we too praise God for His love that has never left us.