When God Hides His Face

(2 of 3)
E

vangelicals' insistence on God's active presence (preachers commonly ask, "What is He doing in your life right now?") inclines many of the Guthries' friends to regard them as singled out, maybe in a good way. "I think David and Nancy have been entrusted with something He couldn't entrust to anybody else," says Dan Johnson, a Christian filmmaker. He turns to David. "I think God is intrigued with your faithfulness." David does not reply. He refuses to believe God custom-tailored this situation, although he holds out hope that through it he may learn something of His ways. "I don't think this is a lesson designed for us," he says. "I think this is a situation with lessons to learn in it."

There is, of course, another active party in the Job story--Satan. Again, David is loath to see supernatural manipulation. If evil is involved, he sees it as part of the general and far-reaching brokenness that resulted from Adam and Eve's sin. "We live in a fallen world that's full of pain and disease and death mixed in with the joy of our being here," he says. "And consistent with that, I think Hope was born to us because we are carriers of a received genetic mutation."

Nancy's idea of what's going on is a bit more personalized. "If God would ask me to suffer this significantly, I think He has something significant He wants to do with it through me, if only just in my heart," she says. Her concept of evil is less abstract than David's. The Bible is replete with instances in which "Jesus may not be the author of evil, but He permitted it [for reasons of His own]," she notes. She recalls His telling Peter after the Last Supper that Satan has asked "to sift you like wheat," a metaphor suggesting agony.

Do the Guthries feel sifted?

"There are moments," says David.

"Here's the thing, David," says Nancy. "We're not even at the hard part yet."

Is God Just?
Along with everything else, Job's friends eventually turn on him. By contrast, the group of fellow believers with whom the Guthries have met every Sunday night for seven years has been an unfailing pillar of strength. They are a high-powered crowd--music executives, a state senator, a former Tennessee deputy education commissioner--who originally saw Hope's illness as a medical challenge to be overcome. As she declined, however, they recast her fate as a call to radical faith. "With Hope, the rubber met the road," says member Wayne Buchanan. "At a time like this, you either believe or not." He says the group finally concluded that "we will go down with the ship, believing in our hearts that God is in control." Some thought this recommitment may have been part of God's plan for Hope. At her memorial, Bob MacKenzie, a group member who has since died of heart failure, said, "The Bible says, 'A little child shall lead them.' Make no mistake about it; this dear, precious child did lead us."

But that rationale was more satisfying before the news of this new pregnancy. "Why twice?" asks Bob's widow Joy MacKenzie. "What can God be thinking? Why not give somebody else this experience and let them do some growing?"

Rabbi Harold Kushner has written that the greatness of the Job story lies in its focus on three propositions that can't be simultaneously true: 1) God is all-powerful; 2) God is just; 3) Job, whom God lets suffer, is a good person. But the debate in Job actually concludes on a fourth assertion, stated by the Lord from out of the whirlwind, that Job has no business questioning Him. ("Where were you when I planned the earth? Do you show the hawk how to fly?") Some believers are frustrated by this pulling of rank, but the Sunday group accepts it. Says Joy MacKenzie: "I think we're shortsighted when we try to think of why God does things in relationship to us. That presupposes it's about us. Maybe it's about something that we don't get." Adds Nancy: "I don't think God is obligated to relate His reasons to me."

Referring to Christ's initial pleas to His father to be spared, Nancy says, "Jesus understands what it feels like to make cries and petitions to the One who has the power to make a different plan, but the book of Hebrews says [Jesus] learns obedience." Perhaps, she says, she can do the same.

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."