“Why did God let her die?”
She looked at me, and my mouth went dry, lips firmly sealed together. Tears filled her eyes, but there was something more than that. There was anger. Anger and despair are intricately wrapped together in the gaze of this 12-year-old girl.
It was my fifth or sixth year as a camp counselor, and as silly as that job sounds, it bears more weight than many realize. Not only are you in charge of children’s physical wellbeing, but frequently they trust you with the emotional turmoil they don’t want to express at home. It is an important job, not to be taken lightly. And I had received training for times exactly like this, but suddenly it felt inadequate. Not just inadequate but wrong. How could I look at this little girl who had just lost her mother and say, “It’ll all be OK,” or “God is doing something good through this?”
As humans, we don’t like pain. It’s natural. We run as far and as fast as we can from the hurt we feel, like jerking our hand back from the searing stove top. Not just physically but emotionally. When someone is sad, our immediate reaction is to cheer them up. But the Bible is littered with lamentations. It is filled with promises that God is comforting us in our anguish. Psalm 34 tells us that “God is near to the brokenhearted.” In Matthew 5, we read, “Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of God.” There are indeed promises of God bringing hope out of terrible situations – and we praise Him for that. But before any of that, He comforts.
Think about Job. When the three friends arrive at the home of a man who has lost everything amid his mourning, they start to theologize. They ask Job what choices he made that led to this tragedy. They tell him even his lamentations are a sin.
And God rebukes them.
If a person like Job entered one of our churches saying things like, “God has worn me out,” or “[God] has torn me in his wrath and hated me,” we would quickly spit out verses of God’s goodness and theologize away these statements. But maybe we shouldn’t. Perhaps we should listen to Paul when he says, “Weep with those who weep.”
In his mourning, Job questions God and his goodness. Not just that – Job was angry. Looking at the little girl who sat across from me, I saw that kind of anger. I saw the most profound hurt I’ve seen in the eyes of another human being. And I couldn’t speak. At that moment, I panicked, asking God to tell me what to say.
But he didn’t give me words.
He didn’t give me a verse.
I asked, and all God gave me was silence.
All I could do was cry with her. All I could do was hold her hand. I sat with her as she told me about her mom. How much she missed her. I can’t imagine the full extent of what she felt, but at that moment, I felt her heartbreak as if at least some tiny part of it was mine.
Years later, I think God didn’t give me a verse or word of encouragement for a reason. When I told the story later, a mentor of mine said, “Kaity – I think that at that moment, you weren’t supposed to say anything. You showed her the comfort of God rather than just telling her about it.” What she needed was someone to sit with her. Someone to weep with her. She needed to feel the comfort of God here and now, not hear a generalization of what God will do one day or the good that will one day come out of this. She needed someone to empathize with before they Christianized.
