The Trouble with God

I buckled myself into the police cruiser.  Our chief of police gunned us out of the driveway and onto the road, fast.  We were looking for one of the sons. 

“I hate a suicide,” the chief said.

“It’s my first.”   

“I’ve been at more than two hundred.  I counted them once.  They never get easier.  Accidents, even murders—those get easier.  Suicides—never.”

“Maybe it’s that…maybe it’s that they had a choice, and instead of trying some more, they chose….”

“Two weeks ago, it was a fifteen-year-old boy—over a girl.  Over a girl.”

Our chief—a father of teen daughters—slowed and then turned abruptly onto another road.  Five teenage boys were riding their four-wheelers toward us on the pavement. They and their vehicles were splashed with mud.  They were whooping it up. 

The chief flicked on his blue lights and stopped and buzzed his window down.  “Where you guys been?”

“Just around,” said one.

“You can’t be riding on the road.  You know that.”

“Yeah.” 

“Don’t make me stop you again.”

“Yeah.”

“Get home now.”

“Sure.”

The chief buzzed his window back up, and we sped on.

After a moment, he said, “His older brother was fine, never any trouble.  But that one?  If we weren’t on this kind of a call, I’d have given all of them trouble.  The other ones, they’re just following that one.”  He was quiet for a moment and then he said, “I’ll probably hear from his father tomorrow, roasting me for hassling his kid.”

“Used to be—if that had been me, and you had stopped me—my father would have roasted me.”

We turned onto a gravel road that wound back and down into the woods.  The cruiser’s headlights came on.  It was evening and dark, now, in the woods—it was a humid, still, Maine evening with swarms of bugs in the air.  After a few turns, we saw the trailer, slowed. 

The chief muttered, “His truck’s here.  Not the car.”

Inside the trailer, dogs—sounded like two of them—began to bark. 

The chief spoke into his radio, reporting our location, then—“Okay, let’s go see.  You going to make the announcement?”

“I scarcely know him.  Know a lot of his family, but not him.” 

“He’ll know you’re from the church?”

“Yeah, he should.”

“Okay.  I’ll make the announcement, then you step forward.”

I trailed the chief up onto a bit of deck, which sagged under the weight of the two of us.  Lots of lobstering stuff piled around.  Louder barking.  The chief peered in through a small window built into the door of the trailer and banged with his fist.  “Arnold?  You here?”

The dogs went berserk.

“Hey, Arnold?”

No answer. 

We backed away, stepping down to the ground.  The chief walked a few steps to peer around the corner of the trailer. “Car’s here,” he called to me. “Arnold’s gotta be here somewhere.”

He strode back to the cruiser, opened the driver’s door, and hit the siren for about ten seconds.  Crows rose from the trees, cawing.  We listened.  Nothing, except the dogs.  The chief hit the siren again.  

Sounds from the woods behind the trailer.  Someone crashing through trees. 

Arnold stepped around the trailer’s corner.  He was carrying a bucket.  “What the hell?”  Then he saw the cruiser and the chief.  He stopped.  “Oh, no….”

“Arnold.”  The chief walked toward him.  I was a step or two behind.  “There’s been a death.”

The chief said a few words in a low voice.

All the blood drained from Arnold’s face.  He staggered.  “What?”

He fell to his knees.  The bucket scattered sideways, spilling black water. 

Arnold collapsed further and now lay on his side on the gravel.  “Arnold?” said the chief. 

Arnold rolled onto his back and, reaching toward the sky with both hands, bellowed, “Why? Why?”

I knelt.  I didn’t know what to do, so I put my hands on his chest and bent closer to him.  He stared at me and grabbed my shoulders and bellowed again, this time at me—“Why?”

“I don’t know.  There’s no way to know.  There’s no logic.”

“I told them.  I told them.  I told them.”

The chief said, “You told them what?”

“It was all going to hell. But why?  Why this?” 

His hands fell away from my shoulders, and he lay boneless on the ground. 

I pressed closer.  “We can get through this.  We can get through this.  We’re a praying body.”  Arnold seemed not to hear.  Not knowing what to do, I repeated myself.  “We’re a praying body.”

The chief squatted down.  “We’ll take you to the house.  They need you there now.  Can you stand up?”

Curses flowed from Arnold’s mouth blacker than the water that had spilled from the bucket. 

My hands were still on Arnold’s chest.  “We can get through this together,” I said. 

His eyes came back to mine.  “Yeah?  How?”

“I was praying with your family, and then we came to find you.  Pastor’s at the house now.”

Arnold twisted and struggled up onto one elbow.  “Oh, God, it hurts.”

The chief said, “Let’s get you up,” and he and I assisted Arnold to stand. 

 

                                                                        ***

 

Arnold needed God.  Of course, a lot of people need God. 

A lot of people are in pain. Pain is everywhere. But a lot of people in pain hope they can handle the pain themselves so they don’t need to need God. 

The trouble with God is that He has this judgment-through-eternity thing going on, and there are a lot of people who prefer to bear a lot of pain, all by themselves, in order—in their minds—to avoid needing God, who will judge them through eternity.   

Way back when, I might probably have been one of them myself. 

But God has this other thing going on, too, by which He un-remembers our sins.

There’s a catch.  The catch about God un-remembering is that He only un-remembers when, first, we accept the love-gift which He gave to us by the sacrifice of His Son. 

Complicated.  That doesn’t track.  Not for a lot of people.

For me, it tracks, but then I’m a believer, so of course it tracks for me.  But it doesn’t track for Arnold. 

                                                                        ***

Arnold stumbled into the back seat of the cruiser, slumped. 

“Are you okay?” the chief asked.  He leaned in.  “Here, I’ll buckle you.” 

Arnold sat straighter for a moment but when the buckle clicked, he slumped again.

The chief started the engine, turned the cruiser around, paused.  “Anything you need to do here first?”

“Huh?”

“Anything you need to do here first?  The dogs?”

Arnold shook his head. 

The chief radioed our situation and then drove—slowly now—through the woods in the dim air and turned onto the road.

I craned back from my front seat.  “You told them what?”

“It was all going to hell.”

“We can get through this.”

Arnold looked at me uncomprehendingly. 

 

                                                                        ***

 

It’s that whole sin thing.  It’s that whole judgment-through-eternity thing.  Arnold hadn’t done anything to deserve this, but now this horrid thing has just happened in his family, and it was going to hurt him and his whole family for a long, long time. 

Sometimes in life you get tipped toward God, when some horrid thing happens like what had happened just now.

When you get tipped toward God it is confusing.  It was easier before horrid things happened and you got tipped toward God—wasn’t it?  It was easier, when life was simpler.  It was easier then, when life was simpler, like football, and you just played through the pain, and took it like a man, and sometimes you won and sometimes you didn’t.

It was easier before, when you didn’t need to trouble yourself about God’s bizarre economics of love and sacrifice and un-remembering, and when you could keep all that godly economics all tucked away in our human past—like it was just a myth from long, long ago. 

But God keeps on creeping back into our minds in that way that He has, and He keeps on tipping us toward Him. 

It would be so much easier if the Son-sacrifice thing was just a make believe story from a time when people weren’t as smart as we are now, and when they needed to have their hands held in order to get through their days.  Not like us, who get through our days just fine—or anyway we get through them okay enough.     

But Arnold needed God, which meant he needed Jesus first.

 

                                                                        ***

 

I was a deacon at my church, and this was my first suicide as a deacon, and I didn’t know what to do to help Arnold find Jesus except one last time to say “We can get through this together.”   

I did not say any of those other things about sacrifice and un-remembering to Arnold while we drove him through the bug-flickering night to a home racked with agony. 

I was a deacon at my church, and I didn’t know what to do. 

It would need to be God to do something for Arnold because He was the only one who did know what to do. 

 

Copyright -- Dikkon Eberhart, 2014