Early this morning, I came across a Facebook post about a terrible automobile accident.
A young father was on his way to work when he was involved in a wreck. According to the post, he had been airlifted to a hospital, was on life support, and had extensive brain damage. The nineteen-year-old driver of the other vehicle had died at the scene.
There was a photograph beneath the post. The injured man was sitting on a beach with his little girl kissing him on the cheek.
I stayed with that photograph longer than I normally stay with something on Facebook.
Maybe part of the reason is that suffering has been bothering me more than usual lately. I’ve been reading about the terrible flooding in Nepal. Hundreds of people have died. Families have lost homes. Children have been displaced. I read about a thirteen-year-old girl whose mother handed her three-year-old brother to her when the flood was coming. She ran uphill carrying him. When she looked back, their house was being swept away.
There’s too much of this.
Not just in Nepal, of course. There always has been.
Cancer. Earthquakes. Children born with terrible diseases. Car wrecks. Alzheimer’s. Tornadoes. A mother who buries a child. A perfectly healthy person who wakes up one morning and by nightfall is dead.
And then there is the suffering that occurred long before there were human beings around to experience or explain it: predation, disease, starvation, injury, extinction.
I’ve been thinking about all of that.
A few days ago, something else arrived.
A fundraising letter.
It came from Ken Boa and Reflections Ministries. I met Ken years ago at a Kingdom Advisors conference in Atlanta. This was back in my believing days, when Christianity occupied a very different place in my life than it does now.
I don’t know Ken well. I certainly don’t have anything against him. My recollection is of an intelligent and thoughtful man, and everything I know suggests that he sincerely believes what he teaches.
The letter offered one of those matching opportunities. If I gave, a group of donors would match contributions up to $225,000.
Years ago, I might have looked at that letter very differently.
Now it has become tangled up in my thinking about the man in the photograph and that little girl in Nepal.
The Answers I Used to Have
For most of my life, Christianity gave me an explanation for suffering.
Actually, it gave me several.
We live in a fallen world.
God gave human beings free will.
Suffering can strengthen us.
God can use terrible circumstances for purposes we cannot presently understand.
This life is temporary.
Eternity will finally make things right.
And, of course, there was always the ultimate answer available when the others failed: God’s understanding is infinitely greater than mine.
I knew those answers.
I taught some of them.
And I don’t mean that contemptuously. I believed them.
If someone had confronted me forty years ago with a child dying of cancer and asked how a loving God could allow it, I would not have shrugged. I would have hurt for the child and the family. I might have prayed with them. I might have helped them financially. I would have taken the suffering seriously.
But I would also have believed that somewhere beyond what I could see was an explanation that preserved what I already knew to be true about God.
God was good.
God was all-powerful.
God knew everything.
Therefore, whatever happened had to be compatible with those things, whether I could understand how or not.
I don’t reason that way anymore.
The Problem That Wouldn’t Stay Solved
Free will never seemed to me to answer enough of the question.
It can at least attempt to explain why one person intentionally hurts another. If human beings are genuinely free, then presumably some will use that freedom terribly.
But a flood doesn’t have free will.
Neither does a tornado.
Neither does childhood leukemia.
Neither does the genetic mutation that leaves a child suffering from the day she is born.
And neither did the disease, predation and extinction that existed in the natural world for millions upon millions of years before anything resembling a human being walked the earth.
Christianity has another answer for that.
The world is fallen.
Ken Boa himself makes that distinction in his writing. Moral evil involves human choices. Natural evil includes things such as earthquakes, tornadoes, tsunamis and disease. His Christian explanation is that we live in a fallen creation and that ultimately God will redeem it.
I understand the explanation.
I simply no longer find it convincing.
That distinction matters to me.
I haven’t rejected Christianity because nobody ever offered me an answer to suffering. Christian theologians have been answering the problem of evil for centuries. Very intelligent people have developed sophisticated arguments about free will, soul-making, the Fall, God’s hidden purposes and ultimate redemption.
Possible explanations aren’t difficult to find.
What became difficult for me was something else.
Did I have good reason to believe the explanations were true?
That question changed things.
Notice
This is where something I’ve been calling The Pencil-Driven Life enters the story.
Notice. Question. Revise.
It sounds harmless enough.
But I’ve discovered that those three words aren’t harmless if I actually use them.
Notice asks me to look at what is there before deciding what it means.
So look.
A nineteen-year-old young man is dead.
Another young father may die.
A little girl may lose her daddy.
A flood sweeps away a family’s house.
Children die from diseases they did nothing to cause.
Earthquakes bury families.
For hundreds of millions of years, living creatures have experienced injury, disease, starvation and predation.
Those things are real.
Whatever explanation I eventually place around them has to begin there.
For much of my life, I think I did something slightly different. I began with what I already believed about God and then asked how suffering could be made compatible with it.
I don’t think I was dishonest.
I think I was protecting something I considered true.
There’s a difference.
But eventually I had to wonder whether I had the order backward.
Question
Suppose I begin not with the explanation but with the world.
What does this world give me reason to believe?
That’s a harder question than asking whether I can imagine some reason an all-powerful and perfectly loving God might permit suffering.
Of course I can imagine reasons.
Maybe suffering produces courage.
Maybe human freedom requires danger.
Maybe God sees consequences extending thousands of years into the future that I cannot see.
Maybe another life will make everything right.
Maybe there is some reason completely beyond human understanding.
Any of those things might be possible.
But possibility isn’t evidence.
And that became increasingly important to me.
If every instance of apparently pointless suffering can be answered by saying that an invisible God has a sufficient reason unavailable to us, I’m no longer sure what observation could ever count against the belief.
A child survives?
God answered prayer.
A child dies?
God had another purpose.
The flood turns away from the village?
God was merciful.
The flood destroys the village?
We live in a fallen world, and God’s purposes exceed our understanding.
I lived comfortably enough with those explanations for years.
Eventually I couldn’t.
Not because I had discovered some scientific experiment proving that God doesn’t exist. I haven’t.
The change was more modest than that and, for me, more consequential.
I no longer thought the evidence justified the certainty I had been carrying.
At some point I had to stop asking how suffering could be made compatible with what I believed and start asking what the suffering itself gave me reason to believe.
I didn’t like where that question was taking me.
But Notice. Question. Revise. isn’t worth much if Revision is permitted only when it leaves my important beliefs untouched.
Revise
I suppose this is one reason I’m reluctant to describe my loss of faith as simply a change in beliefs.
It changed the way I see reality.
I once looked at terrible suffering and believed that, however awful it appeared from where I stood, a loving God remained behind the curtain. He knew why it had happened. He could have prevented it. He had chosen not to. But there was a morally sufficient reason, even if I would never know it in this life.
Today, when I see suffering, I don’t add that part.
I see suffering.
That may sound bleak.
Strangely, I don’t experience it entirely that way.
Because if there isn’t a divine explanation waiting behind every tragedy, then perhaps the suffering in front of me becomes even more important.
There may not be someone else coming to fix it.
There is us.
The person who needs food.
The family that needs shelter.
The child who needs medicine.
The grieving father who needs someone to sit beside him.
The country that needs clean water after a flood.
Those needs don’t require me to settle a theological question before I recognize them.
They are there.
Which Brings Me Back to the Letter
Ken Boa’s fundraising letter is still on my desk.
I don’t resent receiving it.
Ken believes Christianity is true. If he believes that knowing God through Christ is humanity’s greatest need, then devoting his life and resources to teaching Christianity makes sense.
But I don’t believe what Ken believes anymore.
More importantly, I don’t think I have sufficient evidence to believe it.
That makes the donation question different for me now.
If I have a hundred dollars available to give away, why would I use it to help propagate supernatural claims I no longer think the evidence supports when there is demonstrable human suffering all around me?
I don’t ask that rhetorically.
There may be reasons.
Christian organizations often do tremendous humanitarian work. Religious communities feed people, build houses, care for the sick, respond to disasters and provide companionship that matters enormously. Losing my belief in Christianity doesn’t require pretending Christians do no good.
Nor does sending a hundred dollars to Nepal solve the problem of suffering. I could empty my bank account and barely make a mark on what happened there. Tomorrow another disaster will occur somewhere else.
But the question has changed for me.
What deserves my money?
What deserves my attention?
What deserves my time?
And what does the way I answer those questions reveal about what I actually believe?
Years ago, I might have thought helping spread the gospel had eternal consequences while helping rebuild a flooded house addressed only a temporary problem.
Today I can’t make that distinction.
The flooded house is real.
The family standing where it used to be is real.
Their hunger is real.
Their grief is real.
Their need for somewhere to sleep tonight is real.
I don’t need another explanation before any of that matters.
Looking at What Is There
I don’t know what I’ll do with Ken’s letter.
Maybe I’ll throw it away.
Maybe I’ll let it sit there a few more days.
And I don’t know that I’ll send money to Nepal. I don’t want to create a prettier ending than the one I actually have.
But the letter has helped me notice something.
Changing my mind about God wasn’t merely erasing one answer and penciling in another.
It changed the questions I bring to the world.
And suffering may be where that change becomes most visible.
I once encountered suffering and asked:
How can I reconcile this with the God I know exists?
Today I find myself asking:
What does this suffering give me reason to believe about the world I actually inhabit—and what does it ask me to do?
I trust that second question more.
Not because it guarantees the answer I want.
Because it doesn’t.
It begins with what is there.
And maybe that is what I’ve been trying to say all along about a Pencil-Driven Life.
Notice what is actually in front of you.
Question even the explanation you most want to preserve.
And when the old mark no longer seems justified by what you see, be willing to revise it.
Even when the mark is God.
Writing continues to teach me that.
Continue with The Pencil’s Edge
A Pencil Practice
Think of an explanation you’ve carried for a long time—religious, political, personal, professional, or otherwise.
Don’t begin by trying to prove or disprove it.
Write:
What do I actually observe?
Then:
If I did not already possess my explanation, what would what I observe give me reason to believe?
Stay with those questions for a few minutes without forcing them toward the answer you think you should reach.
Read what you’ve written once.
When you have finished, the practice is complete.
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The Pencil-Driven Life 