The Jagged Journey. Barry Lee Callen

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      THE JOURNEY

      Suffering—God’s Heart and Our Calling

      Barry L. Callen

      THE JAGGED JOURNEY

      Suffering—God’s Heart and Our Calling

      Copyright © 2018 Barry L. Callen. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

      Cascade Books

      An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

      199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

      Eugene, OR 97401

      www.wipfandstock.com

      paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-3973-9

      hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-3974-6

      ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-3975-3

      Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

      Names: Callen, Barry L., author.

      Title: The jagged journey : suffering—God’s heart and our calling / Barry L. Callen.

      Description: Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018 | Includes bibliographical references.

      Identifiers: isbn 978-1-5326-3973-9 (paperback) | isbn 978-1-5326-3974-6 (hardcover) | isbn 978-1-5326-3975-3 (ebook)

      Subjects: LCSH: Suffering—Religious aspects—Christianity.

      Classification: bt732.7 .c335 2018 (print) | bt732.7 (ebook)

      Manufactured in the U.S.A. 02/26/18

      Dedication

      I am a man blessed with wonderful grandchildren, the best. They are the future. I dedicate this work to them, hoping that each will come to know two key things:

      • The loving and self-giving heart of God;

      • The compassionate life to which God’s children are called.

      As they travel what at times likely will be a jagged journey of faith, may they embrace and rejoice in this great news and big challenge—

      Your life is a journey you must travel with a deep consciousness of God. It cost God plenty to get you out of a dead-end, empty-headed life. He paid with Christ’s sacred blood, you know. . . . If we walk in the light, God himself being the light, we experience a shared life with one another as the sacrificed blood of Jesus, God’s Son, purges all our sin.

      —1 Peter 1:18, 1 John 1:7, The Message

      FOREWORD

      Robert Kennedy rose to make a campaign speech to an enthusiastic crowd near my home in Indiana. It was a fateful day in 1968. Instead of his prepared speech, he quieted the crowd and dramatically changed the subject, announcing the assassination that very day of Martin Luther King, Jr. Kennedy, soon to be gunned down himself, proceeded to deliver a somber speech urging calm, love, and peacefulness in honor of the slain prophet of non-violent social change. Kennedy’s words of calming wisdom included these:

      My favorite poet is Aeschylus. He once wrote, “And even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

      This present book echoes the sentiment of these ancient poetic lines. In the journey of faith in this broken world, the follower of Jesus Christ will encounter a jaggedness that can injure and confuse. There will be instances of pain, injustice, violence, and grief. But there also will be bursts of love and glimpses of wisdom and hope coming through the sheer grace of God.

      We Wish It Were Otherwise, But It Isn’t!

      A mortal, born of woman, few of days and full of trouble, comes up like a flower and withers, flees like a shadow and does not last. . . . Don’t blame fate when things go wrong—trouble doesn’t come from nowhere. It’s human! Mortals are born and breed for trouble as certainly as sparks fly upward.

      Job 14:1-2; 5:7

      Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.

      The Princess Bride (1987)

      This is a book I would have chosen not to write, but somehow there was no choice. It’s an unavoidable subject, God and human suffering. What a difficult and troubling combination of words! For those who believe in an all-powerful God, the suffering of anyone, and especially of those who love and serve God, is troubling. Even more troubling is the thought that God suffers because we sin.

      A best seller was Rabbi Harold Kushner’s book When Bad Things Happen To Good People.1 Why should that ever happen to good people? And how could it possibly be that God suffers when we do? Well, biblical revelation makes clear that suffering resides at the center of God’s heart and also is key to our calling as followers of Jesus. Anyone who tells you differently is selling something.

      Does God Cause or Just Help Our Suffering?

      I confess. Like Harold Kushner, I don’t want to treat suffering like a crossword puzzle, making every piece fit together neatly and thus not reaching people where they are—hurting! Suffering people want an answer to the question, “Why?” They don’t want a graduate class in technical theology. But what if any satisfying and responsible answer to the “Why?” question requires clarifying some basic theological assumptions? Sorry, but it does. That’s what chapters two and three of this book are about.

      Suffering haunts all humans sooner or later. When it does, it raises difficult questions, even for a devoted Christian.

      Those suffering often tend to assume that God controls everything and must have a reason for having brought the suffering. Presumably God caused it, or at least allowed it because of what the sufferer did to deserve it. So the questions come. Did I do something wrong or does God have reasons beyond my comprehension? Either way, the answer leaves sufferers hating themselves for being at fault or feeling badly toward God who brought the pain, won’t explain why, and makes things worse by not stopping it.

      There’s got to be a better answer to “Why?” than “we all get what we deserve.” Our experience tells us that many people don’t get what they deserve, despite Isaiah 3:10–11 and Proverbs 12:21. This world isn’t as neat a place as Psalm 92:6–8, 13, 16 describes. Therefore, we’re left with pushing off until the judgment of eternity the straightening out of all the earthly injustices. Or we come to another insight that frees us to think again. Maybe the Bible reports our many human thoughts on the matter of suffering but doesn’t necessarily teach as truth all that it reports.

      If Psalm 92 is too neat a picture of the world we know—the righteous, in fact, don’t always flourish like a palm tree, then Psalm 121 might help. It says that relief from our suffering comes from the Lord. This implies that our help and not necessarily our suffering comes from God. We must be careful what we decide to lay at the feet of God.

      Suffering haunts all humans sooner or later. When it does, it raises the most difficult of questions, even for the devoted Christian. We cry in pain and reach out in desperation and confusion. We believe, and then we’re not sure we can believe. We want healing and death comes. The best we can say then is that death is the ultimate healing. Yes, in a sense it is, but why the substantial