We sat in my shady back yard, in lawn chairs with green striped webbing, on one of those rare summer days—a brilliant sky flecked with fleecy Chagall clouds. Against a background that could hardly be more serene, she was spilling out to me a decade of anguish.
Like so many others, she had grown up in a warm Christian family, then trashed it all for a pilgrimage full of so much pain the wonder is she survived until she was ready for redemption. She had tried on lovers like new clothes, played with drugs of all shapes and colors, and tumbled headfirst into a mystery religion that amalgamated esoteric Hinduism and psychobabble.
Somehow, her long and tortuous journey had led her back to a starting place in the shelter of God’s grace. She had come to me, hungrily, to explore a new faith that would retain the words from her childhood but imbue them with new meaning.
She retraced her anger, calmly: at God, as she had picked at threads on the couch where she had been forced to kneel in prayer during family devotions. At her father, who could not bring himself to say “I love you” and who had hugged her as a child “reluctantly, nervously, as if I had knives in my breasts.” Forgiveness had healed much of the anger from the past. Now, however, she was trying to figure out Christians.
“Do they believe what they say—that people truly are lost, damned to hell? Do they have the slightest notion of what it means to be lost? To be terrified for 24 hours a day, to be shut off from God? How can they go on making potato salads for the church bazaar? Why don’t we all quit our jobs and be missionaries?”
Her voice caught and she stopped for a moment. She was leaning forward, and great, shining tears dropped straight to the ground like raindrops. Her eyes were pale gray and clear, so intense that when she looked at me I felt I could see directly into her soul.
She had found a welcome in God’s arms, had devoured the Bible with an awakened, searching mind, had begun the first toddling steps in the Christian life. Her metamorphosis was beautiful to watch. But she shrank from the smugness and callousness of other Christians she now had to regard as family.
And still, bitterness against God smoldered. “Why couldn’t he be clear? I know, I know, all that stuff about human freedom; but why did I have to go through hell? My unbelieving friends are so sincere—why couldn’t he give them more clues? What right does he have to run the world in this incomprehensible way?”
I thought of what to answer as she talked. We could have assayed God’s silence together, but she had gone beyond that finally to hear his voice. I could have speculated about other conceivable worlds and why God lets this rebellious canker sore of a planet run its course. I could have used a clinching phrase like, “God’s inaction is actually a sign of his mercy, not his reticence,” or perhaps asked a conundrum like, “Is a redeemed, fallen world better than a nonfallen world?”
Those thoughts all flashed through my mind as I listened. She had come to me for spiritual counsel; shouldn’t I compose a worthy response?
Instead, when she fell silent I could only think of the prodigal son, welcomed home to banners and a feast, with mud still clinging to his ragged clothes. His father’s hug was utterly convincing and love swallowed up the son’s yet-unanswered questions.
“You. You’re the reason,” I said finally. “God allows the world/puts up with it/planned it—however you want to say it—because of you. You left him as an angry, bitter child. You charged down every route that led away from him. And now you have come back. As an adult. Your love for God now is wise and bloodstained. It’s that freely given love that fuels God’s patience.”
She sat silent for a long time until she finally nodded. It was an old theme, vivified by the prophets, a theme so strange and jarring that it could only have come through revelation: God, the jilted lover, aching but still on the prowl. Love cannot resolve intellectual dilemmas. It can only awaken trust. She was well on her way.
