Anyway, I've been thinking about trust. No, not again, still. It's in the back of my head. Though I've started to delve into a couple other topics, they're all being weighed in my head as helps me understand trust or does not help me understand trust.
I read a book this morning called They're All Dead, Aren't They? by Joy Swift. The subtitle is "A Grieving Mother's Journey Toward Hope". What happened was that she married an older man at age 15. He already had 3 kids, who she loved as her own, and then they had 2 girls together. The youngest was only one year old when they were all murdered by a "friend" of theirs. He shot them, some multiple times, and he stabbed the 4 year old as well. Anyway, the book is her story of how she got married, came to love the kids and lived with them as their mother, the murder and her own emotional turmoil, and her journey to healing and peace. (Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that the oldest daughter wasn't killed, because she was in the hospital. She died 20 days after the murder, from cancer.) As I read through the book, I came across a couple paragraphs that really interested me, and sparked my thought processes.
"'God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.' Revelation 21:4
The former things, the wicked, the evil, will pass away. So many times people have tried to blame God for the loss of their loved ones. When a singer dies they say, 'Perhaps God needed a good singer in heaven.'
If God had meant for my children to die, how can we punish the murderers for fulfilling God's plan? In a day of man-made chemical additives and cancerous pollutants, how can we blame God for Stephanie's cancer? Years of man's mismanagement of God's earth has created cancer. Man's pain is self-inflicted. Innocent people suffer under the hand of another.
Retarded and deformed children are a result of man's degenerative state. Babies who die in abortions are man's choice, not God's. We were created perfect, and each of us has the capacity to be perfect. Years of man's mismanagement has caused our diseases and deformities. Man's lustful, self-satisfying desires have turned our earth into a cesspool in which we all must live.
But someday soon Jesus will return to restore the earth and do away with the evil ones of this world. They will burn just as the tares that the time of harvest in Jesus' parable. A cleansing fire will destroy all the impurities of our present world, taking all the evil ones with it.
For the first time I began to feel sorry for the two who were responsible for my children's deaths..."
I have been anguished in my mind because of the thought, God, why didn't you do something? Why didn't you stop them from hurting me?
And yet I see that God has promised to someday wipe out evil. He'll stamp it out for good. Is that why he did nothing when I was being beaten? Is that why he did not intervene during the years of molestation? Because he knew that, someday, it would all be made right?
It's funny, because there are also grains of hope yet undissolved that swirl amidst the eddies of my thoughts... but I don't know how to get it out onto paper.
I can see the big picture-- if he had stepped in and just stopped them in their tracks... where's the fairness in that for the perpetrators? He would be taking away their freedom of choice if he were to do that. And yet... sometimes, he does intervene. I don't get it.
So we cling to the hope of eventual righting-of-wrongs? What about all those promises that say the Lord is a strong tower? That he is our refuge and fortress? That he'll protect us? What do I make of this apparent contradiction?
But for Joy... she was able to be satisfied with the fact of a future retribution. Can I?
Is trust based on what someone has or has not done for us? Or is trust based on something more than actions? Perhaps those are the questions I need to be asking...
I really want a turkey sandwich right now.
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