BY REV. DR. DAWN WEAKS
Pastor, Connection Christian Church
“It’s cancer.” That’s not what you want to hear when you’re in between taking your son to piano lessons and your daughter to track practice. But seven years ago, after my annual mammogram, the suspicious looking calcification had been biopsied, and wham.
There you go.
I kicked breast cancer to the curb in October of 2015. But the theodicy lessons I learned from it have stuck with me.
“Theodicy” is our belief about God and how God interacts with suffering. There’s a lot of theodicy that seems to work for people that doesn’t pass muster with me anymore. I don’t begrudge people their “everything happens for a reason” and “If God brings you to it, He’ll bring you through it” sayings. I might be a little jealous of them, even, because their comfort seems within arm’s reach. After years as a pastor journeying beside people who were sick, abused, addicted, incarcerated, dying, laughing, grieving, and growing, I am compelled to dig in to Scripture and Christian tradition to seek out some things that seem true and not just trite.
For one, I believe I got cancer not because it happened for a reason, nor that God “brought me to it.” I believe I got cancer because humanity has broken our world. I’m made from our world’s dust, and I live as a part of it, so I’ll get broken sometimes, too.
Furthermore, I believe that God doesn’t want the world to be broken like this. This wasn’t in the original design (check out Genesis 1 and 2!). Suffering needlessly surely wasn’t somehow in God’s plan for me, or for anyone. I just can’t get on board with that.
But what I am 100 percent on board with is that God is not just sitting up in heaven, distant from us and all our suffering. I believe that God entered into our suffering in Jesus. You want to know where God is when we are hurting? Look at Jesus on the cross. This is a picture of where God is: God is right there with us, absorbing suffering and somehow using it to love and save the world.
I believe that suffering can be comforted by the gently powerful presence of God with us. It’s been true for me, and I pray you find it not trite, but true, for you.
