Bumper Sticker Theology

Posted by Jenny Rae Armstrong in Mystical Meanderings of a Love-Struck Soul

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It's been a rough year up in my neck of the woods. Our church lost two babies to SIDS and two young mothers to cancer, a statistic that would be less shocking in a larger community, but slices right through the heart of a tiny town like ours. My family lost a grandfather to kidney failure and an uncle to bladder cancer. The Wall Street debacle flushed what was left of a local economy that had been in the toilet since shipping dried up in the late fifties, devastating the homes, bank accounts, and job security of those of us clinging like barnacles to the shallow, rocky soil our stoic Scandinavian ancestors dug their plows into. And that’s all on top of the ongoing, everyday problems of living in a broken world. I spent most of last night lying awake, listening to my autistic son cry in his sleep, cleaning up the mess created by a GI system that just can't absorb food properly. Somewhere between awake and asleep, set to the dissonant sound of my son’s distress, I remember thinking, "It's not fair, God. It's just not fair."

It's true. It's not fair. Yet in some ways it is fair, brutally fair. God causes the sun to shine and the rain to fall on the righteous and the wicked (and heaven knows we're all more than a little bit of both!), and didn't shrink back from experiencing all the joy and pain of being human when he came to earth in the person of Jesus, a baby born into poverty and oppression, into the hopeless mess of humankind.

Why does a loving God allow bad things to happen? Why do we even ask? We have bought into the myth that we are entitled to an easy life, that it's God's job to smooth our paths and make them straight, to protect us from the fall-out of simply being human. Life wasn't so great for Jesus, or his family, or his disciples, either. Why? Because God was mad at them? Because God didn't care? Because they didn’t have enough faith? Because God blinked, and something slipped by him? No. Life was hard for them because in the words of the bumper sticker, shit happens, and sometimes it happens to us. No one is immune.

The Western world is addicted to comfort. We cruise down the path of least resistance in our climate-controlled SUVs, singing along to our favorite Christian radio stations, but what happens when we hit a bump in the road and get a flat, when we start leaking oil and burn up our engine? Do we set the emergency brake, lock our doors, shake our fist-clamped cell phones at the sky and wait for God to show up with a tow truck? Or do we climb off our high-horse, join the ranks of suffering humanity, and start putting one foot in front of the other in the direction of home?

I babysat a lot as a teenager. When I was fifteen a family I sat for, the Muirs, decided to take in a foster baby who had been born without a brain. When Karen, the mother, told me what they were planning to do, I was angry. That baby was going to die, and everyone knew it. Why would they put themselves through the pain of becoming attached to a baby who was doomed from the get-go? Why would they put their children through that pain? "But Jenny," Karen reasoned, "don't you think he has a right to be loved, too?" I supposed I did, but not at the expense of people I loved. Not at the cost of causing them pain.

It was not until little Emory's funeral, just over a year later, that I began to realize the impact his life had had. Not because of anything he had done-because really, there wasn't much he could do, besides breathe, suckle, and mess his pants, and even those were iffy-but because of the way he had been loved. Because of the Christ-like way the Muirs embraced the blessing and suffering of this tiny bit of beautiful, broken humanity, claiming and redeeming it for a greater purpose, and received more in return than they could ever have imagined.

What did I learn from Emory and the Muirs? That pain is not something to be avoided. That suffering and blessing more often than not come wrapped in the same package. That sometimes, it's enough to be loved by a heartbroken God who came to claim and redeem us for a greater purpose. Sometimes, it's just enough.

It's been a blessed year or so in our neck of the woods. May the love, peace, and joy of a God who knows what it is to suffer sustain us all through the next, and lead us safely home.