Where Was God When…? Blog Tour

When’s the last time someone didn’t meet the expectations you had for them? Like 5 minutes ago, right? We expect to get our burger in the drive-thru without ketchup just like we ordered it. Three blocks later our expectation of burger goodness is shattered by no ketchup. We want our money back…or a chance to explain to the dude that made the mistake just how big a moron he is. And then there’s the really big expectation with big disappointments. Sometimes the blown expectations of others wreck our reality and our big expectations explode right along with theirs. It’s those kind of expectations that are loaded with emotional pain and trauma.

In a new book called Where Was God When…? Ric Garland tells his story of shattered expectations:

“When I was in college, I loved spending time with people, and especially dating girls. I never got serious with any of them—what guy does when he’s young? One day my mother wanted me to meet this girl. Right, I thought, I’m going to meet a girl that my mom wants to introduce me to. It was New Year’s Eve and I was home. We went to the church and she introduced me. Well, I hate to admit it but, uh…she was pretty. She was smart, witty, challenging, engaging, and we just hit it right off. I fell in love with Karen, and my life changed, with this amazing girl becoming a big part of it.

Our relationship went up and down. We got close and then she backed away. We got close and she backed away. I was still in college, and she was teaching at a Christian school. When she decided she was going to go to Japan and teach some missionary kids for a couple of years, I thought it was great, but once she was gone, my heart broke. I had to tell her the truth. So, I wrote her a letter and told her I loved her. Right at that time she came up with some physical problems that complicated some things emotionally and spiritually, and she had to come home.

At the same time, I was a missionary and was attending a missions conference an hour and half from home. After it was over, my dad and a friend met me in the back. My dad took me down to an office and told me that Karen had put a noose around her neck, kicked a chair out from underneath herself, and hung herself that morning.

Have you ever had that knot in your stomach that you couldn’t get rid of? Did you ever feel the pain so hard that you couldn’t explain it to anybody? I felt that. I felt that rejection.

I remember for weeks afterward driving down the road and literally seeing her hanging from a noose, calling out my name.

Where was God? I was supposed to marry her. I loved her. Why did God let that happen?”

Ric’s expectations of love and marriage were obliterated. He felt like God had let him down. From Ric’s perspective God had dropped the ball. God “allowed” someone to slip through a cosmic crack in our imperfect world. How could a perfect God allow that to happen? Where was God, exactly?

God was there the whole time. His love for Karen and Ric never wavered. It was rock solid. Still is. So why doesn’t God in all of His perfection make our life perfect, too? We want God to intervene and make our lives into what we think is a perfect reality. Our expectation is that we want God in all of His perfection and flawless character to adopt our flawed view of what perfect is. We want God to craft and control the circumstances of the world into our design of how we think things should be.

God isn’t going to make changes that aren’t in line with His character. The Perfect Being doesn’t need to exchange perfection for imperfection. And for us to think that He’s going to change the results of things to what we want would be asking Him to do something imperfect.

Okay, so God’s nature and character never change. But we humans, on the other hand, tend to react to the pain in life with inconsistent spiritual and emotional responses. We set our expectations of other people in a concrete mix of “must” and “should” and react with disbelief because the world we live in is made up of “maybe” and “I’m not sure.”  In other words, life isn’t neat and clean all the time. It’s pretty unpredictable and messy. When we demand things must go a certain way and they don’t, we set ourselves up for disappointment, anxiety and anger.

People are going to disappoint us because they’re imperfect. To expect perfect or near perfect responses from imperfect humans isn’t realistic. We tend to forget that, though. That means that disappointment, anxiety and anger aren’t going to go away soon. The good news is, we can have a lot less emotional pain by changing how we think (Romans 12:1-2; Philippians 4:1-8).

It’s really helped me to reflect on the true, right, lovely and pure things in situations that are less than perfect. How do you think you would deal with a death like Karen’s?