by Lea Sims
“You grew up in church with your Aunt Beth, didn’t you?” She nodded. “Don’t you think God offers his love freely to all? Or do you think people have to earn it?” Drew asked.
Delaney gave him a grim smile, clasped her hands together on the table in front of her, and said, “I can’t give you an opinion about that, Drew. I’d have to believe in God to answer that question.”
It was Drew’s turn to be surprised. He had not expected that answer. He’d assumed that because Delaney had been raised by Elizabeth, she must have been a believer, though possibly a disconnected one. But if Delaney was claiming atheism, then she had knowingly walked away from a foundation of faith. In Drew’s experience, prodigals only ran from God when they didn’t get the inheritance they were expecting from him. Delaney had some deep disappointments about God, and Drew hated to see disillusionment cloud her lovely eyes. He didn’t know her well enough to kick down any of the bricks in those walls of hers, but it was enough to make him curious.
“Ahh, well…that’s an interesting response,” Drew said ruefully. “I find that people who tell me they are atheists have camped out quite strongly in that opinion but are not always well fortified to defend it.” Delaney opened her mouth to respond, but Drew was standing up and looking back at the kitchen.
“Perhaps we can discuss it later after your aunt’s service,” Drew said. “Right now, I need to help clean the kitchen so I can be ready for worship warm-up when Abby gets here.”
Delaney grinned and said, “So let me get this straight. You sing like an angel, play guitar, minister to the homeless, challenge atheists, and clean kitchens?” He took a bow and kept smiling. She arched an eyebrow and quipped drily, “Do you rescue stray kittens, too?”
He gave her a rueful smile and said, “Well, no…but I do rescue dogs.”
With that divinely timed and unexpected remark, Drew turned on his heel and headed back to the kitchen, leaving Delaney to sit thunderstruck and still as a stone, staring at his back in amazement.
“Death is more universal than life. Everyone dies,
but not everyone truly lives.”
—Alan Sachs
“Losing someone we love is never easy. Even when there is time to prepare for a death, like when a family member passes after a long bout with cancer, we can still be left with a huge gaping hole in our hearts—a hole that time can’t quite heal, a hole filled with nothing but questions. We want to know why our loved one had to die. But that question is just a shadow of the one we really want to ask…why do any of us have to die?”
Pastor Jason Moore stood on the platform with his hands in his pockets and his heart on his sleeve and spoke simply and powerfully about the common bond of grief all humans share when it comes to the death of a loved one. He had learned that people who bring broken hearts to a memorial service are not looking for platitudes and they don’t want to be preached at. Human beings came to funerals the same way they came to the emergency room—traumatized, leaning on the support of others, and wanting to be anywhere but where they were.
Sitting on the front row, Delaney was doing her very best to remain expressionless and respectful. She was also trying hard not to look at the closed casket, draped in one of her aunt’s quilts and covered in fresh lilies, that was sitting off to the right of the platform.
“Whether we like it or not, death is a reality. It’s one of the few certainties we’re given in this life. And at times like this, it can be very tempting to cry out in anger and pain, shake a fist at God, and blame him for his callous disregard of our friend or family member. That gaping hole in us,” he continued, laying his hands across his heart, “the one that’s filled with nothing but questions, points our eyes heavenward in a desperate search for answers. And you know why we do that? Because God actually wired us to turn to him when we are in pain, to bring our grief and confusion to him. But human beings so often misunderstand that innate impulse. When death and grief turns their eyes to heaven, their pain often blinds them. They see God as the one who handed them that pain rather than the one who wants to take it from them.”
Delaney heard the pastor’s words and closed her eyes. Her heart squeezed in her chest, an intense and painful memory flashing unwelcome to her mind. She was in the bedroom of her house a month after her parents had died, packing up the remainder of her belongings to take to her aunt and uncle’s home. Emptying her desk drawers, she had found the small pink leather Bible her mother had given her one year for Easter and, holding it tightly to her chest, had curled up on the bed and wept long bitter tears into her pillow. Where are you, God!?! The words that had been stuck in her throat for weeks had finally come tumbling from her heart and lips in a hoarse and anguished cry that had filled the empty room around her. She had desperately needed answers. Why did you take my parents? Why are you making me live with that monster? But no answers were ever forthcoming.
Pastor Jason paused for a moment in the middle of what he was saying, causing Delaney to look up. His hands were back in his pockets and he was looking up at the ceiling. She followed his gaze to where all the beautiful lights were hanging down from the rafters like twinkling stars in the night sky. “It’s hard to imagine that a God who could speak stars and planets into existence and paint the evening sky with radiant sunsets could so easily sit by, unmoved and disinterested, while a child of his creation suffers and dies without his intervention.” He paused again, his eyes moving across the crowd and coming to rest on Delaney. For just a second he held her gaze and said, “But the thing is…God is never unmoved or disinterested.”
Delaney leaned forward ever so slightly, her eyes searching his face. “We mistake God entirely when we assume that if he does not stop our pain, he does not care about our pain.” With this statement, he pulled a hand out of his pocket and held up an object between his thumb and fingers. It was a mahogany chess piece—a pawn about three inches in height. “If you’ve ever played a game of chess,” he said, “then you probably know what a strategically challenging game it is. A good player is one who can anticipate their opponent’s next move and make their own next move accordingly. A chess master can anticipate the most likely upcoming moves and countermoves for both himself and his opponent—often many, many moves ahead. A lot of people make the mistake of assuming that this is how God orchestrates his universe.”
Pastor Jason then took the pawn and placed it on a flat table next to his podium. Delaney could see that there was a simple chess board unfolded and lying open on the table, and he had placed the pawn on one of the squares. The pastor stepped back, pointed to the pawn and board, and continued with conviction, “When we cry out to God and ask him why he didn’t save our loved one or stop our circumstance from happening, we’re subscribing to the idea that all of life is a chess board—that it’s just an elaborate board game where God and the devil—where good and evil—simply make their moves and countermoves, and we are just pawns on that board. Not only that, we shake our fist up at one of the chess players and accuse him of not moving the pieces on the board in our own best interest.” He paused to let that sink in. No one stirred in the room, including Delaney, whose gaze was now fixated on the chess piece sitting on the table.
“But when our amazing God conceived of and created the universe and placed us at the center of it, he was not looking for a good game of chess.” When he stressed these last words, they carried across the room and echoed up into the rafters. “When it comes to humanity, God wants relationship, not ownership. In chess, the pieces on the board have no freedom, no authority over their own destinies, no ability to move or refuse to move. For us to freely navigate the chess board of our own lives, God had to willingly withdraw his hand from the chess pieces he had created and positioned on the board. He had to allow those beautifully crafted pieces to move on their own. The instant he did that, a vast and endless timeline of chaotic possibilities came into play. Every kind of human choice—both good and evil—
was now possible on that board. Every kind of random and unexpected outcome was also now possible on that board. Including the sudden death of a loved one without any warning or explanation.”
Several people exhaled into the heavy space of that statement, as they were suddenly all brought back to the reason they were gathered there. Delaney let the pastor’s words settle in her mind, stirred deeply by the truth of his illustration but still not understanding how they were supposed to feel better from his explanation. If God had taken his hands off the chess board of this world, that meant he either wouldn’t or couldn’t intervene in tragic situations. That meant he was rather irrelevant, Delaney thought. She was surprised to feel saddened by that realization. She had actually been holding her breath, secretly hoping Pastor Jason was going to give her a reason to consider believing in God again.
Thrusting his hands back into his pockets and staring down at the top of his shoes for a moment, the pastor gave a sigh of his own. “You know, some people have reasoned this explanation out for themselves and arrived at the premature and faulty conclusion that since God gave us free will, we’re pretty much all on our own down here.” Upon hearing her thoughts echoed, Delaney’s eyes flew up from the floor to his face, her pulse quickening. “But why would God go to all the trouble to dream up and create all of this…all of us…humanity…just to withdraw and leave us to figure it all out by ourselves? The answer is—he wouldn’t and he didn’t.”
He walked back to the table, squatted down and peered closely at the pawn. “Friends, our God watches over this chess board with an intense and uninterrupted gaze. He keeps his eye on every piece that’s positioned on this board and every move that’s made upon it. He cares very deeply about what happens here. He wants to help us navigate our way around it—not by picking us up and forcibly moving us from one place to another.” He lifted the pawn and moved it from the square it was on to one several spaces away. He let it sit there a moment and then said, “No, that’s not how he wants to do it.” He moved the pawn back to the square it had been sitting on and stood up, turning to look out at the people sitting in front of him.
“Here’s the thing…just because God lets the chess pieces move on their own doesn’t mean he is disinterested and unmoved by what’s going on. Quite the contrary. He’s the only one with a full view of the entire board—past, present, and future. He’s omniscient and omnipresent, which means he’s the Master. He doesn’t just anticipate a few moves ahead. He already knows them all—from the beginning to the end. Even though he doesn’t make our moves for us, he knows all the moves we can possibly make, and he knows all the obstacles that can and will lie ahead of us.” Squatting back down and turning his attention back to the pawn on the board, he added, “When we acknowledge him and trust him, he promises to order our footsteps for us. That simply means he wants to show us which way to go.” He pointed to and tapped on a specific square on the board. “We can choose to stay where we are or we can go our own way,” he said, moving the pawn to a different space. “Or we can trust his vantage point and go where he directs us.” He then moved the pawn to the space he had pointed to.
“Either way, the choice is ours.”
Delaney, who had been leaning forward stiff as a statue, sat back in her seat considering his words. They were very compelling. If there was a God, it made sense to her that this was the only way it could truly work. But what it didn’t address was how unfair life could be, and whether God even cared about that.
“What about the choices other people make? The ones you have no control over…the ones that pull your whole world down around you,” Delaney asked, uncharacteristically blurting her question out. “Where is God when that happens?” She then turned three shades of red, realizing she had literally just interrupted a preacher in the middle of a memorial service and that everyone was now looking at her.
Pastor Jason took her question in stride, smiling at her dubious expression. “Well, Delaney, I believe those moments are just as hard on God as they are on us. I’m sure there are a million or more times a day that God would like to put his hands on these chess pieces down here and move them all around so no one gets hurt or killed or abused. But if he did that all day, we’d be right back to being pawns in his hands, moved and manipulated against our will. Don’t get me wrong. I do believe there are times when God moves his sovereign hand into this earthly plane to nudge humanity in the right direction, but for the most part, he chooses to do his work with us and through us. And when something tragic happens in our lives, we have to know that he saw that tragedy coming long before we did, and that he has a plan to walk us through it or around it. He is always, always working things for our good even when we can’t see how any good can possibly come out of a terrible situation. One thing I can tell you for certain, though. God never causes our tragedies.”
He shook his head slightly and smiled, both surprised and delighted that what he had intended for a sermon had opened the door to a dialogue, and two-way conversations were always better sermons. He would love to engage her further, but he knew he needed to move on. He turned back to the congregation and said tenderly, “God did not cause Elizabeth Lowell to have a stroke in her driveway the other night. But he certainly knew it was coming, and he was ready to receive Elizabeth into eternity.”
At these words, Delaney felt her heart constrict. The picture of her aunt sitting dead at the wheel in her car all night in the driveway had not left her mind since Claire had called her on Saturday morning. The pastor’s powerful explanation of God was chipping away at the ice around her heart, but it did not help her process what had happened nor did it make her feel better about herself. If anything, it made her feel more ashamed and uncertain of who she was.
“If anyone understood this simple truth about God, it was Elizabeth Lowell,” Pastor Jason said, his eyes glistening. There was a murmur of agreement and a couple of “Amens” declared around the room. “She understood what it meant to walk by faith—that trusting God meant she couldn’t see the big picture,” he pointed down at the chess board, “Or understand the master strategy. But she didn’t need to know it. It was enough to her that God knew it. Elizabeth was happy to let him lead her life. If he told her to stay on a single square for a long time, she stayed there. Many of you know that she had a challenging marriage, a husband who had an alcohol problem. She shared that testimony at Storytellers last year.”
Delaney looked around to see people nodding, and she was stunned. Her aunt had never said a word to Delaney about her uncle’s drinking. It was not acknowledged. Delaney had always felt it was the elephant in the room crashing silently into everything and turning their whole home upside down. The most her aunt would ever say when her uncle would drink too much was to tell him to “go lie down.” It was his drinking that had dictated how every family meal and holiday would turn out, his drinking that had to be hidden and made excuses for with people at the church, and it was his drinking that had driven him into Delaney’s bedroom in the middle of the night. There were so many secrets and lies and unspoken things in her family, they could choke a horse. And her aunt had never acknowledged a single one of them. But apparently, Aunt Beth did talk about it with her friends here at Refresh. Delaney shook her head, bewildered.
I’m in the Twilight Zone, she thought. She exhaled raggedly in a way that had both Claire sitting next to her and Drew sitting across the aisle turning to look at her with concern. Her hands were trembling. She rubbed them on her skirt and slid them under her legs to sit on them.
“There are many women who would have walked out of a marriage like that,” Pastor Jason continued, unaware of the distress his words were causing Delaney. “I can’t claim to know what it’s like to live with a severe alcoholic in your house, much less to be married to one, but from what little I know of Elizabeth’s story, her life with him was not easy. No woman walks down the aisle on her wedding day expecting to be married to a drunken and neglectful husband
.”
Drunken and neglectful. Delaney’s mind reeled again. His words pierced her to the core. For the first time, she saw her uncle through her aunt’s eyes. What must Aunt Beth’s life have been like? Delaney was ashamed to admit the question had never occurred to her. At least a dozen memories and images bombarded her brain of her aunt’s patient but haunted expression every time she had to make up an excuse or lie about why her husband didn’t go into work or didn’t show up to serve at church on Sunday. She thought about the times her aunt had spent hours making a beautiful meal only to have her uncle come home from work, crack open a beer and head for the recliner to watch the news. And the times he got a little too friendly or too loud when they were eating out at a restaurant. Her aunt would quietly and lovingly try to get him to lower his voice. Delaney kicked herself in the mental shins. What was wrong with her? Why had she never thought of any of this before?
Pastor Jason looked over at Delaney, as if suddenly remembering that Elizabeth was not the only one who had lived in the house with Jim Lowell. “That had to be hard on both of you, Delaney,” he said, startling her out of her thoughts. She looked back at him dazed. Hard on her? Was he kidding? He was looking at her with such compassion that she simply could not take it. Something began to unravel inside her, and she wasn’t sure she could respond. Suddenly, this was all too much for her—too many swirling thoughts, too many emotions clamoring for attention. She clenched her teeth and simply nodded, lowering her eyes back to the floor.
From his vantage point on the opposite front aisle, Drew could see the tension on Delaney’s face. He could also see that she was fighting hard to maintain her composure. Jason must have seen it, too, because he wisely turned back to the congregation and moved on.
“Regardless of her circumstances, Elizabeth Lowell trusted God to lead her. If that meant staying put and being faithful in a difficult marriage, she let God lead her. If it meant having the courage to bury that same husband and live alone for the rest of her life, she let God lead her. And if it meant uprooting her entire life of faith and stepping into a new church family, new opportunities, and new experiences, she let God lead her. This room is filled with people who have been impacted by her unwavering commitment to let God lead her.” Again, there were heartfelt “Amen” and “Yes, Pastor” affirmations from all around the room.