I have understood only barely of tragedies that assail one’s faith, bring him to the brink of giving up, of “It is too much; I can no longer believe.” Now, it was not the recent tsunami that made me think anything along these lines, but the case of the BTK murders, still in the headlines. The tsunami, however huge, was an impersonal thing; because of the sheer number of people that were killed in one fell swoop, it seemed almost surreal, something that the mind could not comprehend — so big that a finite consciousness could not properly wrap his mind around it. But the BTK murders, that someone could consciously, purposefully do that to another human being — it was incomprehensible in quite another way. It was a personal thing: I could picture it, if I wanted to; we all have seen enough movies to be able to see in our heads something as gruesome as this with little or no problem. I could say that the tsunami affected me in a similar way as 9/11 did — I was unable to assimilate something that was that much larger than me. But what one human could do to another individual, and then another, however heinous: that was within my province of knowing, if only in scraps of horrid imagination.

In between the flashes of twisted fantasia, the thought of how God could allow such evil to happen briefly brushed by. It made me think, made me see how it could happen, how one could have seen enough wrong and wronged not to be able to prop up within himself the idea of a God who was all good. I found I could not myself find fault in the sincere doubter, the one for whom the problem of evil, the problem of so much pain, made him not able to keep kindling in his heart the last embers of his faith. But then, however, a thought came upon me, from the mouth of Paul: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.” [Romans 8:18 NRSV] And I thought, Paul was not one who was trivializing the pain, but glorifying God — on the correct scale. Thus, if you could imagine it, was the true glory of the Lord: that these incredible sufferings that happen (and they were no lighter in the time of Paul): they are not worth comparing to the good to come. And I hoped within my heart I could remember this, if it ever came to me, if my faith were ever so tested. Even if it meant only to hold on, desperately.

As I travel as I may down these volatile paths, it is only a fool’s hope that tragedy never will strike me, that there will never be pain — but I may pray, still, for something: that I be strong enough to withstand when it does. For that would be a piece of the glory, right there. Hallelujah.