When questions beget more questions
and why Nashville needs Easter, especially right now.
I’ve been working on an article, a critique of sorts, about wellness culture and how it’s really fudged up our relationships with our minds and bodies. I have most of it written and was planning to publish it soon.
But tragedy struck our city last week and those words about wellness just don’t seem very important right now. They are important, just not right now.
Heaviness, darkness, fear, grief. Unspeakable horror. It’s harrowing. It’s devastating. And it’s left me with spinning thoughts and questions, questions after questions after…questions.
It’s not like I haven’t heard about school shootings before. I have. But it hits really differently when something like this happens just miles from where you live. Not only that, but Covenant is a sister church of our church so it feels close to home. On the day of the shooting, my small group text thread was blowing up with asks and updates, revealing how my close friends were connected with families who lost precious children last week. Children. Murdered in school. My eyes continue to well with tears as I type words that should never have to be typed, events that should never be a part of our present reality.
And if you’re a question-asker like me, especially a question-asker as it relates to the human condition, I bet you can relate to the swarm of questions that have consumed my brain over the past two weeks. I won’t share all of them— you wouldn’t want to read that many questions. But I’ll share the ones that I keep coming back to the most.
How is it that human life is no longer considered reverent and sacred?
How is it that a person can become so detached from their capacity for empathy that they commit murder?
How can we be so numb?
Why can’t people understand how problematic it is that we have become so desensitized to violence and trauma…like… it’s become normalized to watch a video camera recording of someone murdering people and to be expected to just continue life as usual. That’s disturbing.
Have we, humans, become so objectified that we have forgotten the value of breathing and living?
How is it possible to see someone as so utterly disposable?
Why are complex problems met with people shouting simplistic solutions on the internet?
Why is it so easy to obtain an assault rifle, a literal weapon of mass destruction, in this country?
Is it even possible in a world so broken to put systems in place that would keep guns in the hands of those whose intentions are to only protect others and keep them out of the hands of the “bad guys?” Can this even be done?
Republicans and Democrats both piss me off with their hypocrisy. I’m tired. Partisan politics suck and are a massive part of the problem. Why can’t people, people who are super political, people married to their beloved political party, see how distracting politics is from actual issues?
How long, Lord… how long?
Is this just what we do now when we disagree with each other? Do we think that is justified ground to take someone’s life?
WHY?
Why this kind of world?
Why did a world like this have to be created?
Why couldn’t new heavens and new earth just exist without suffering? Why did Adam and Eve have to mess it all up?
If God is all-powerful, couldn’t He make all of the sad things come untrue NOW? Why do we have to wait? God, why aren’t you stopping all of the bad things now? I know it’s not because you feel indifferent and I know it’s not because you want us to suffer, but knowing this doesn’t stop me from circling back to the question I love to hate… WHY !?
Logically, philosophically, and theologically, I know a lot of these answers. At least I think that I do, in part. But emotionally, it just feels so confusing and painful and awful. Because it is. It is confusing and painful and awful. Perhaps even if I knew why, it still wouldn’t make any sense. Perhaps I can’t know why right now, and even though it feels a little bit crazy to still believe in a good and Loving God— maybe mystery and uncertainty are places that I need to visit, even places calling me to stay a while. Maybe I need to find a bench and take a seat.
And while I can’t understand why God didn’t appear to do anything last Monday here in Nashville, I recount, as my husband reminded me yesterday, that story after story in the Bible is of hurting, traumatized, and confused people asking that very same questions I’m asking right now— where were you, God? Where are you, God? How can you allow this?
My brain is riddled with questions, desperate cries, and laments. Tears well up in my eyes as I tickle Emmy’s tiny toes and splash in the bath together, frightened by the harsh fact that I cannot protect her, fully, from this fractured, traumatized, horrific world. So I savor every goofy grin, splash, and giggle, counting it all as evidence that there is beauty and goodness among me.
How do you grapple with the possibility of losing your child? Maybe you think that I know the answers because I’m a therapist. But I don’t.
Today is Good Friday. Today God knew exactly what it felt like to lose his child. And while it feels hard to imagine that, since it happened so long ago, it doesn’t make it untrue. I can’t wrap my tiny human brain around it. Sometimes it doesn’t even feel comforting, and I don’t really understand why, but what I believe is that God knows exactly what it’s like to lose a child in an unfathomably traumatic, gut-wrenching way. He even did it willingly. My mind cannot comprehend that.
The only reason we can even call this day “good” is because the story doesn’t end here.
The promise of Easter is coming.
He promised us and promises us now that darkness and death wouldn’t— and won’t— ultimately have the final word in our stories. Though it is our present reality, it won’t be our forever reality.
And while this doesn’t take away even an ounce of the embodied pain and trauma that we have to endure in this life, it does at least give me hope alongside it.
My soul needs Easter. It needs the reminder of Easter especially right now. It needs hope. Not so that it can bypass the grief and sorrow that continues to hover over Nashville but so that it can be held next to it.
Doubts have swarmed my brain this week. Sometimes I wonder if everything I’ve just said isn’t true. And I’m grateful that I get to commune with a God who can handle my doubts and who actually welcomes them. We don’t have to be afraid of doubt. Or anger, expletives, and tears. Christians, we get to wrestle with these things. We don’t have to placate our genuine questions and the worries that plague us with over-spiritualized, empty platitudes.
I’ve asked God a million times this week where the hell he’s been.
And every time— without fail— she’s said: here. Emmanuel, God with us. Amidst tragedy.
I don’t understand it. And maybe that’s the point…
BUT WHY ?!
If it is the point…I don’t like it.
With honesty,
Rachel
((*P.S. This article resonated with me a lot. Our senior pastor shared it. Apparently, I’m not the only one incessantly asking why).