Even This
Finding God inside the mystery of suffering
This book will not tell you why it happened to you.
It cannot, and the books that claim they can have done more harm than most people know. What it will do is refuse the explanations that were handed to you in God's name and were never His: that He sent it to teach you a lesson, that you lacked faith, that everything happens for a reason you will one day be grateful for, that He needed another angel. A whole part is given to what God never said.
Then it turns to what He did. He entered. He did not explain suffering from a distance; He came inside it, and the cross is not an answer to the question but a Presence in the middle of it. From there the order is firm and it does not bend. Help first. Before any talk of offering it up, before any spiritual meaning is drawn from anything, the person in pain is helped: the doctor, the counsellor, the friend, the medicine, the sleep. Only then, and only if they choose it, does the book speak of the offering after, the ancient and freely chosen way of uniting what cannot be changed to Him.
There is a part for when healing does not come, written for the people the healing services forget. And the last part is about the God who stays: Emmanuel, even here, even now, even this.
Every page was written to be readable by a person in pain, on the day they are in it.
Where it stands
The full first draft is complete. Theological and clinical reviews are open. Nothing in it explains any particular person's suffering, and nothing in it ever will.
Letters drawn from it will appear here as they are written.
- God did not do this to teach you something
The sentences kind believers say at gravesides and hospital beds, why each one breaks in the hand, and the one picture of God against which every reason offered to you can be tested.
- A cry is still a prayer
A third of the psalms are complaint. The angry prayers you have been swallowing are already in the Bible, given by God to be prayed, and there is a psalm that ends in the dark for the nights when you do too.
- This is not a punishment
When illness or loss arrives, most of us start searching the past for the crime that explains it. Jesus was asked that question twice, and both times He refused the premise.