"What Do I Do With a Dad Killing His Four Year Old?"

There's an awful, awful story here in the Durham area about a dad killing his four-year-old son. It's been haunting me for two days. My middle girl is four. I cannot imagine a little boy calling out to his dad to stop hurting him (he was suffocated) and his dad pressing through those cries to his death.

For two days I've been wrestling: what do I do with this? How do I think and pray this through in light of what I believe to be true about God?

Here's a rough attempt at gathering up a couple day's worth of thoughts.

First, I weep. This is awful. It is right to mourn this senseless act. It is appropriate that the killing of a child should tap into something deep inside of me. Jesus weeps at the tomb of his friend Lazarus: death was not in the original design. This should not be. And so I am invited to mourn it.

Secondly, I must guard my heart against a self-righteous demand for justice. This takes some nuancing.

On the one hand, justice is a good thing. We are blessed to be in a country that attempts, at least, to take justice seriously. God is just. God is the one true just judge who will some day judge everything and everyone rightly. We have a good instinct to want to call injustice out (alas, except for where we happen to be benefiting) and to see it put to rights. This is part of what it means to be made in the image of God.

But on the other hand, my craving for justice can become vindictive and self-righteous. It becomes about someone else "getting what's coming to them." And when I start to think in these terms I'm on perilously thin ice.

Jesus is adamant about where murder comes from: the heart. And he is insistent that we recognize that the very things that drive a dad to kill his four-year-old son are at work in our own hearts, too:

²¹"You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.' ²²But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother, 'Raca,' is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, 'You fool!' will be in danger of the fire of hell.

So here's the deal: it is good to want justice. But I must realize that I am under the same sentence as this man. My heart and his both have the same sickness.

Obviously there's a difference in degree--actually killing someone is of much greater consequence in the world than calling them a name. But it is not a difference in kind. When I start to think that what this dad did is in a completely different category than what I wrestle with in my own heart, then I have lost step with the Spirit of Christ. The Spirit of Christ invites me to see the murderer and recognize myself in him.

And so I must confess that this dad and I share in the same sickness and are under the same judgment. We both have deep wickedness and deception and brokenness at work in our hearts. And we both deeply need forgiveness.

And the crazy/hard/mysterious thing is that we both have it offered to us. Jesus who "takes away the sins of the world" has already paid for that dad's sin and mine. Jesus absorbed his sin and mine at the same cross, in the same death.

There's no lesser fine that Jesus has to pay for my sin of anger in my heart than there is for that dad's sin of killing his son. Both of us require a real death, by a real person, on our behalf. No weaseling out from under that. I must face that dead-on.

The Scriptures are mysteriously silent about the question "where did evil come from?" We do not know. The Scriptures invite us to embrace a faithful agnosticism about the origins of evil.

But we are not agnostic about how it has been dealt with. Evil has been dealt with once and for all in the mighty double-stroke of the sword of the Father and the Son and the Spirit in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. His resurrection is the hope for us all.

And so that is where I land. My hope and prayer is that the boy who's dad refused to hear his cries for mercy will be greeted by a good Father who always hears all the cries of those who are afflicted, oppressed, and cry for mercy.

My hope and prayer is in the work of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. It is in the plan laid before the foundations of the world for the Son to willingly submit to death so that the dad who killed his son and me with my own sin might be reconciled to God.

My hope is in the resurrection life, secured by Jesus, offered to everyone in real-time. My hope is that the four-year-old boy will one day be raised again from the dead in Christ Jesus with shouts of joy. And he will be raised to newness of life in a new earth without mourning or tears or death or sickness or illness--mental or otherwise.

And my hope is that I will be raised with him. And maybe (hoping against all hope) his dad will be there with us, too.

The Challenge of Hope...and the Gift of Disappointment

So the problem with most of us when it comes to hope is that we're hoping for things that are pretty perishable. The sell-by date hits and it's gone.

The struggle that many of us have when it comes to the life of faith is that God didn't come through for something that we wanted. Circumstances didn't change. We didn't get into the school or job or relationship that we wanted.

I think that God at some point in all of our lives will press us to ask this question: are we hoping in change of circumstances or are we hoping in the one who is Lord over our circumstances? Will we hope in things perishable or in things imperishable ?

We were made to hope. All of us.

And that hope-mechanism is actually way too precious to be handed over to our circumstances. And so God, in his mercy, allows things to not happen as we would wish in order that our hopes might not be rooted in something so small as the situations of our lives unfolding precisely as we would script.

That's the challenge of hope.

What if Cynics and Idealists are the Same Person?

What if the most naive idealist and the most jaded cynic are both operating under the same wrong assumption?

What if the cynic and the idealist both wrongly think that our internal hope mechanism is meant to be directed towards a somewhat arbitrary lining up of circumstances?

What if both are working under the same operating assumption that says that hope is all about events lining up in such a way that suits our preferences at any given moment but that might change in the next based on the weather, our mood, what was served in the cafeteria that day, or who happens to be around at the time?

What if the idealist and the cynic both wrongly think that hope is about circumstances turning up roses? What if it's just that the idealist thinks those events will happen and the cynic has given up on those things ever happening? But what if it's all based on the same faulty assumption?

What if our hope mechanism is too wonderful, powerful, and valuable a thing to be used for such a flimsy purpose? What if the One who implanted the hope mechanism inside of us wants our hopes to be built around a Who rather than a fragile alignment of a series of What's?

What if the disappointments that pock-mark so many of our lives are a gift? What if disappointment is a tutor, designed to wean us off putting the weight of our hopes in a "what?"

What if disappointment is meant to coax us, lead us, bless us into putting the weight of our hopes into the Who that we were made to put them in?

What if cynics and idealists are both wrong for the exact same reason? What if hope wins, but it's not a hope that looks according to our scripts, in our timing, in our ways?

What if it really is all about a "who" not a "what?"

De-Planking My Own Eye

One of the great parts about my weird job is that occasionally I'll discover that the things that I'm given to work on or teach on are as much for me as they are for my students.

So last week I spent many hours working on a talk about hope. I talked about the importance of finding our hope in a Person (Jesus) rather than the fragility of a specific sequence of circumstances. I posted a bit from that talk last week after I gave it.

So I gave the talk on Thursday night. And then Friday morning, as I was journaling and praying, the scales were pulled back and I realized that in one specific area of my life, this was exactly what I needed to deal with.

I had a whole wad of hopes bundled up in a far-off hoped-for series of circumstances that was stirring up in me a spirit of animosity, greed, pride, competition, comparison, jealousy, anxiety, and grasping.

I had spent all week working on a talk for other people and hadn't realized that there was a plank in my own eye that I needed to pull out! My hopes were in all the wrong places. I needed to repent, to change my mind, to fix my eyes not on a hoped-for specific sequence of events and circumstances but on the person of Jesus Christ, who invites me to follow him personally into the hope that he has for me.

This was only furthered by a reading that I happened upon from one of my favorite authors, George MacDonald. I've mentioned him here before, but I'll fill you in again: if you like anything that C.S. Lewis writes, you need to read George MacDonald. When you do so, you realize how much Lewis "stole" from his mentor.

Seeing this made me feel not quite so bad about how much I steal from C.S. Lewis.

Here's a taste of George MacDonald at his best: "In anything that a man does apart from God he must fail miserably--or succeed even more miserably."

Oh that God himself might be my good. That my hope might actually be in him and his goodness rather than flimsy and fragile circumstances. And that I might actually run away from anything, even "success," that would be divorced from his goodness and presence.