When a really, really old devout Christian dies, it seems there's this aura of, "See? God gave her a long, amazing life because she was so strong in her faith," and when a young atheist dies in a brutal way, the aura is the opposite. If he had just believed, he wouldn't have died so miserably, so soon.
But what of the young child with incurable brain cancer who believes that Jesus is her savior?
What do we say about her?
She doesn't believe enough? Or her belief isn't real? Is it not deep enough? Or is this just part of the plan?
Maybe it's the remnants of my agnosticism, but I do believe the world is a warped, broken place with so much damage that we've created added onto the chaotic innate power the world has already.
So we develop cancers. And we die young. Or our genes and development and lifestyle mesh just so and we live for eons.
But in all this, two things are true: God is present and nature is unforgiving.
How do the two line up? We just don't know. You know what I mean? If you give somebody a charmed life full of happiness and without suffering, the first bit of suffering they incur, however minute, will be catastrophic. We're seeing the world, as cruel and heartless as it is, from the perspective of that person, our suffering now placed on the scale of the infinite. We can't know what it means or why we have to endure it.
But what we can know is that through this suffering, we grow, we become humble and we empathize. We also learn to love more wholeheartedly and unabashedly. And in those things, we become relevant to the rest of humanity in that we are probably more likely to show people humility, grace, forgiveness, love and compassion that they might know a world where these things exist and in that way, there is always a potential for believing that there is a God from whose essence these things emerge.
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