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FINDING JOY AT JOSH’S BEDSIDE

“If God is so good, and if God loves us so much, then why is there so much pain in this world?” I guess that’s probably the hardest question floating around this ripped-up old planet. Why is there pain? Why is there hurt?

About two and one half years ago one of the employees here at our Adventist Media Center had an enemy invade her home. Josh, her 16-year-old son, was hit with leukemia. Now her days are filled with hospital visits, scrounging around for blood platelet donations, endless hours at a bedside, chemo, discouragement, fatigue, doubt. There’s not one single good thing about the experience, and so many of us who are on the sidelines can hardly do much more than that: stand on the sidelines and pray. And frankly, as we read through the hundreds of books that try to grapple with this mess — The Problem With Pain, Where Is God When It Hurts?, Disappointment With God, What To Do With Doubt and on and on and on — there don’t seem to be good answers. Not that would satisfy the heart of Rachelle, Josh’s worn-out mom.

And you know, the atheist looks at the City of Hope cancer ward and says: “See? How can there be a God?” The cynic looks at what Slobodan Milosevic did to his native Serbia, and says: “See? In all that ugliness and evil, do you religious dupes really see a God? Come on.” A discouraged social worker dealing with AIDS and crack cocaine and gangs and graffiti in the inner city of Los Angeles looks at the discarded syringes and the 13-year-old victim of a drive-by shooting and weeps to the heavens: “See? God, are You out there somewhere to see? Do You exist to see all this wretched stuff happening in the world they say You made?”

It makes very hollow the smooth, Hallmark promise of Ecclesiastes 3:11, doesn’t it?

“He has made everything beautiful in its time.”

And the discouraged among us say with a sigh: “He must be talking about some other time than the 21st century, because things aren’t looking so good right at the moment.”

Our radio series title for the week is this: MADE FOR JOY. And already you think we must be coming at this subject by way of the back door, because from the sound of it, mankind was made for nothing but tears and temptation and the terror by night. The wonderful Christian apologist C. S. Lewis confesses in his autobiography, Surprised By Joy, that as a boy he and his brother Warnie had this motto:

“Term, holidays, term, holidays, till we leave school, and then work, work, work till we die.”

Year by dreary year, this was young Jack Lewis’ life. He attended boarding schools where he led a wretched existence. The boys there were cruel tyrants; petty politics hung over the place like a smoky cloud. There was no joy whatsoever, and his brief holidays were always marred by the ticking of the clock, signaling his soon return to the hell of dormitory life.

In his recent Christian bestseller, The Bible Jesus Read, Philip Yancey tells how as a young man he got into reading all the cynical, hopeless writings of the so-called great philosophers. They were existentialists, and soon he decided he was one too.

“Looking back now,” he confesses, “I can see that I mainly identified with the despair. Why am I living? What is this circus all about? Can one person among the five billion make a difference on this planet? Those questions pounded me like ocean waves as I read the writings of the French novelists, then Hemingway and Turgenev. All the turbulent questions of the Sixties washed over me, and existentialism provided an answer of sorts by insisting they have no answer. As I kept reading, I found that more current literature — John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., John Irving, Jerzy Kosinski, Walker Percy — gave off the same scent of futility, a scent stale as old cigar smoke.”

Well, friend, in the midst of all this stale cigar smoke and hopelessness, the Bible talks about joy. Happiness. About the fact that joy is really what the original blueprint of heaven was all about. In fact, if you go back to that passage I just read, Ecclesiastes chapter three, where it’s talking about a time to weep, a time to die, and about “vanity, vanity, all is vanity” — or “meaningless, meaningless,” as the newer versions put it — we find that all of verse 11 reads like this:

“But this was not God’s original plan. In the beginning He made everything beautiful and created man in His own image. He put in man’s heart a sense of time and eternity, but man will never understand everything that God plans and does.”

And so we have this series title: MADE FOR JOY. Friend, God created Adam and Eve, and now you and me, with the idea that we would experience joy. NOT meaninglessness. That we would be happy, fulfilled beings. Now, are we encountering that joy? As the kids say these days, “Are we having fun yet?” Maybe not. But JOY is what the original blueprint called for.

You know, we do find in this world two realities. The atheist points to the cemeteries and the street drugs and the butchery in Bosnia and says, “All this pain proves there’s no God.” But for a moment let’s look on the other side of the fence. Go with me up to my native Canada, to the pristine, breathtaking beauty of Banff National Park and Lake Louise. To a sunset off the Florida coast. To a field of flowers in Amsterdam. To a waterfall in Africa, a field of wheat in Kansas. Go to a hospital ward where a kid who had leukemia has just beaten the enemy and gotten well. Go to a graduation where a boy with a handicap is getting his diploma. Go to a wedding where a bride and groom are facing a forever of love and hopes and dreams.

And you know, after all the cigar smoke of existential despair, Philip Yancey balances the scales with this powerful observation:

“Where did our sense of beauty come from? That seems to me a huge question — the philosophical equivalent, for atheists, to the problem of pain for Christians. The Teacher’s answer is clear: A good and loving God naturally would want His creatures to experience delight, joy, and personal fulfillment.”

Then, after name-dropping all of those brilliant but bored “Where is God?” writers, Yancey adds one from the ranks of the joyful.

“G. K. Chesterton,” he writes, “credits pleasure, or eternity in his heart, as the signpost that eventually directed him to God.”

Maybe you’re not seeing much beauty in your world right now. But friend, admit it — you have a SENSE of beauty, don’t you? In your heart and mind, you have a picture of what ought to be. Where did that inner longing for joy come from, that vision of the mind? If we who are Christians can’t always explain pain, listen, those who are non-believers have an even tougher challenge in explaining how beauty and happiness and joy are realities we sometimes know in actuality, and always know as tangible dreams. We know the beauty that ought to be. And of course, for the man or woman who determines in their heart to believe in the Word of God, we know the beauty and the joy that are going to someday triumph in the universe. Have you read this promise from Psalm chapter 30?

“Weeping may remain for a night, but rejoicing comes in the morning.”

And this additional guarantee for all the fatigued moms like Rachelle, who sit by hospital beds night after night as their children fight against disease and death:

“Those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy.”

So we really face two challenges. One is to hang onto that picture of future joy, to know that joy is the upcoming reality. To believe that we were made for joy, designed for delight and happiness. And really, when we know that songs of joy are coming, that morning follows night and peace comes after war, it can even make life here in the Shadowlands more bearable, and more joyous. St. Theophane Venard once wrote:

“Be merry, really merry. The life of a true Christian should be a perpetual jubilee” — and now get this — “a prelude to the festivals of eternity.”

Isn’t that good? When we smile in the darkness of today, it can be because we know that sunrise is coming and the party is soon to begin. And the second challenge is to actually be joyful now — not simply in waiting for heaven, but now — because we already have the Supplier of joy in our lives today.

“Life need not be easy to be joyful,” William Vander Hoven once observed. “Joy is not the absence of trouble but the presence of Christ.”