Tragedy

Well, hello everyone. This is Dave Scherrerrer. I'm your host of Kingdom Offerings. That's the podcast environment of 100 Fold Ministries. And today I'm wondering, kind of out loud, how we're to make sense of the senseless. When things happen in the world that are not sensible at all, they are non-sense and things that are different than what we expected, different in a bad way. I'm thinking about the capacity for human evil that is in my mind a non-sense. In just these past 10 days, the horrors of the Hamas terrorists advancing on innocent children and mothers, families, grandparents in Israel, that has once again attacked our sensibilities. The continued war in the Ukraine, the atrocities in Western and Eastern Africa, all these just cause us to draw back. We cannot wrap our minds around such evil, how we can do such terrible things to each other. And of course, these terrible things that humanity has done to each other is not new. Since the murder of Cain and into the days of Babylon, there has been unspeakable evil. In my mind, the most senseless and profound evil in the history of humanity is the betrayal and the murder of the morally perfect Son of God, Jesus, the very Christ. So evil is not new. But when it strikes home, the fact that it's not new hardly comforts us. When tragedy strikes, it causes us to ask, what in the world has gone wrong? We say to ourselves, this is not the way it's supposed to be. We shake our head and we look to the stars. I know a young couple that desperately wants to have a child and instead they've experienced miscarriage after miscarriage, one after another. I know a single mother who is caring for her only child who is terribly sick and she is worn thin just trying to get through life. I know a recently retired man who's caring for his wife who is suddenly wheelchair bound because of a once-in-a-million tragic illness. This is not how things are supposed to turn out. Let me get personal for a second. Fifteen years ago, my wife, Susan, suffered a massive brain hemorrhage from a ruptured aneurysm. The typical path on these type of episodes means that the victim dies in less than 15 minutes by bleeding out into the brain cavity. She was air transported to the hospital and I prayed and I sped to be at her side, not knowing on that short drive whether or not she would survive the flight. She did. Her path toward healing took six weeks of intensive care and then weeks of rehab and her body fought back courageously. On her way towards healing, she faced another four or five near-death episodes. And I cannot tell you why she recovered, and she did. And I cannot tell you why another will under the same circumstances instead find death. Tragedy and loss, both personal and in our world, it's all difficult to comprehend against the reality of a good and powerful God. I was recently encouraged to publish a book list of books that I thought were important or articles that might help us in our journey of faith. So I wanted to start that today, start a list of books in this podcast that I believe you might find to be a good read in this time of world and personal turmoil. The first one is called A Grace Disguised. The byline on it is How the Soul Grows Through Loss. It's by Gerald Sitzer. And reading from the publisher's book description, it says, Loss came suddenly for Gerald Sitzer. In an instant, a tragic accident claimed three generations of his family, his mother, his wife, and his young daughter. While most of us will not experience loss in a catastrophic form, all of us will taste it. And we can, if we choose, know as well the grace that transforms it. A grace disguised plums the depths of our sorrows, whether due to illness or divorce or the loss of someone we love. It says that the circumstances are not important. What we do with these circumstances is. And coming to the end of ourselves, we can come to the beginning of a new life, one marked by spiritual depth, joy, compassion, and a deeper appreciation of simple blessings. That's the description of A Grace Disguised by Gerald Sitzer. The second one I would recommend is a book by a favorite of mine, a favorite author, C.S. Lewis, who wrote A Grief Observed. And again, the publisher description says this, written after C.S. Lewis's wife's tragic death, he wrote it as a way of surviving what he called the mad midnight moment. A Grief Observed is C.S. Lewis's honest reflection on the fundamental issues of life, death, and faith in the midst of tragic loss. This work contains his concise, genuine reflections on that period. And he quotes, nothing will shake a man, or at any rate a man like me, out of his merely verbal thinking and out of his notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself. A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis. Well, wrapping up, I want to say that just this morning I was talking with my brother Brian, who is still grieving the loss of his wife Sandy from several years ago. In the shadow of her death and this loss, we spoke of the kingdom of God and the knowledge that God is a rewarder of those who diligently seek him. And one of those rewards is a very great hope of an eternity with those we love who are hidden with Christ. And that we both talked about the not-so-small hope of a promised new body. You see, it's ours to choose, to choose to hold on to hope by faith in the goodness that God is healing us moment by moment, even through the loss and tragedy and suffering, through the tragedies of life. We remember that our Savior said to us that in the world you will have tribulations, but he also said that I'll be with you in those trials right to the end. So peace to you. Shalom. This is Kingdom Offerings and I am David Share of One Hundred Fold Ministries. Shalom to a hurting, and I must say a dangerous world. Seek safety in Christ. Take care.