When God Hides His Face

The disadvantage to such obedience is that it risks suppressing the understandable human indignation that suffuses Job. David relates that recently a neighbor said to him, "Forgive me. I'm not as holy as you are. This kind of thing makes me want to look up and say, 'God? What the f___ are You doing?'" Sheila Walsh, a Sunday-group participant, remarks of God that "if You took my son, I wouldn't doubt You were alive; I just wouldn't talk with You anymore." Nancy recalls that after Hope died, she was reading the story of the leper who says to Jesus, "Lord, if You are willing, make me clean." Jesus cured him, replying, "I am willing."

"When I looked at that," says Nancy, her eyes welling up, "I thought He was saying to me, 'I was not willing [to spare Hope].'"

Evangelicals perceive God as doing miracles daily in response to prayer. Many prayed that He would heal Hope, and now the prayers are flowing again. The Guthries are surprisingly unreceptive. Unlike a tumor or an infection, David explains, "the gene mutation our son will be born with is in his fabric, the way this little one is made." In that context, healing prayers can seem less like requests that God change a wrong than that He change His mind. "God's thoughts," Nancy believes, "are perfect."

She has even begun to wonder whether such prayers aren't a bit lazy, the "believer's version" of secular America's tendency to seek comfort rather than moral challenge. Nancy was surprised when several Christian friends suggested that no one would judge her if she had an abortion, an option the couple never considered.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

Today the Guthries have returned to the neonatal ward of Nashville's Baptist Hospital, where Hope was born, to discuss the coming birth. They recognize a nurse. "Jackie!" shouts Nancy. She reintroduces herself. "We had a little girl who didn't live that long." "Oh, I'm so sorry," Jackie replies. Then, surveying Nancy, she brightens. "But I see some good things in the making."

Says David a little later: "Without a couple of bedrock assumptions, none of this makes sense to anybody. You take that away and, boy, it is..."

"...bitter," says Nancy.

"It's all bad," says David.

In Job's 42nd chapter, Job, chastened, says to God, "My ears had heard of You; but now my eyes have seen You," and he surrenders his grievances. Where some readers see defeat, Nancy finds triumph. "God reveals Himself," she says, "and in that process Job's questions disappear." Here is the classic evangelical understanding: suffering is not an injustice, nor a punishment. Rather it is a harrowing invitation to a higher dialogue. Nancy has been working out some thoughts on paper lately. Job, she writes, "was blessed through his brokenness, by his restless pursuit of God. He had a new, more intimate relationship with God, one he could never have found without pain and sorrow."

"In the darkest of days," she writes, "we've experienced a supernatural strength and peace." Like Job, "we often cannot see the hidden purposes of God. But we can determine to be faithful and keep walking toward Him in the darkness."

And so they do.