Rev. Mark LaRocca-Pitts, Ph.D., on an answer to all our “whys”

God’s Mysterious Mercy

In my work as a hospital chaplain, it is a rare day when I do not hear from someone the following: “one day we will understand,” or “when we get to heaven, then we will know.” There have even been times when I have said, “God will have a lot to answer for one day.” We are daily confronted with a level of suffering that confounds all our ability to rationalize: a loved one, too young to die, is killed tragically in an accident; in the prime of life, you are diagnosed with a terrible and terminal cancer; in the years that should be “golden,” an implacable gray depression descends; in a schoolroom deemed safe, a crazed gunman enters. Yes, we like to think, God will have MUCH to answer for!

And with that thought, I often envision a scene that will occur on that day when I first arrive in heaven: I march up to God with the confidence of the redeemed and I pull out my list of all the wrongs and all the suffering that I witnessed and experienced and I ask God to reveal to me that “bigger” picture in which all these horrible things will somehow make sense. And then God will show me that “bigger” picture—the grand scheme of God that sweeps across all time and space in which even the tiniest details of our lives are shown to be part of God’s grand overarching purpose and plan—and everything will make sense, and I will be satisfied. This image used to bring me great comfort and often helped me to move forward in light of terrible suffering. But recently a new image has come to me that somehow helps, though I am not yet sure how or why.

The scene opens in the same way: I march up to God in heaven and present to God my list of terrible sufferings demanding an explanation. And God, instead of revealing to me that “bigger” picture in which all suffering and death will somehow make sense, instead opens wide his heart and like a moth drawn to light, into God’s heart I plunge experiencing as I fall the fathomless and incomprehensible pain and suffering that God also experiences whenever a single one of God’s children suffers, feels pain, and dies. I see and feel every tear that God shed for you and me. And in those very tears of God shed for me and for all of God’s wonderful creation, all my pain, all my suffering, all my tears, and especially all my questions are washed away. I understand: the answer to all our whys are the very tears of God. It is God’s mysterious and vast mercy and not God’s purposeful and rational plan that in the end brings home the quiet assurance that God is indeed with us whenever and wherever we hurt.

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