by Lee Strobel
“I never questioned whether God exists, but I confess that there were times when I questioned his goodness. There’s a book called Hating God, in which Bernard Schweizer named a new religion—misotheism.5 These are people who admit God exists, but they hate him and refuse to worship him. Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov is a misotheist, who expounds his hatred for God after recounting case after case of human suffering.”
“How do you get beyond those emotions?”
“In the end, I know too much to think that God isn’t perfectly good,” he replied. “I’m grateful he allows us to vent our frustration. Read Ecclesiastes or the psalms of lament—they are startlingly honest. For me, I found that there’s a practice that helps put everything into perspective.”
“What’s that?”
“When I’m angry at God, when I’m distressed and anguished and seething at my circumstances, I think of Christ hanging on the cross for me. This brings me back to spiritual sanity. He endured the torture of the crucifixion out of his love for me. He didn’t have to do that. He chose to. So he doesn’t just sympathize with us in our suffering; he empathizes with us. Ultimately, I find comfort in that.”
“As a philosopher, you’re accustomed to giving intellectual answers when people ask why there’s suffering in the world,” I said. “If you were to step back and offer a strictly cerebral response to someone in your situation, what would you say?”
“I look at it in terms of the worldview possibilities,” he replied. “Atheism doesn’t give a sufficient answer—under that philosophy, the world is meaningless and there’s no purpose for life. Islam believes in a personal God, but not in a savior. Pantheism doesn’t have a God who cares about the plight of people.
“Compare Jesus with Buddha. The first of the four noble truths of Buddhism is suffering. It’s not that there is suffering in a good world, but life is suffering. The Buddha’s answer is to escape the world and enter nirvana through a change of consciousness—to depersonalize yourself and sort of float out of the world. There’s no resurrection, no redemption, no savior.
“Christianity is so different. Think of Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus. Jesus weeps; he identifies with the suffering of Lazarus’s sisters. They’re angry—‘Why, Jesus, didn’t you come earlier? You could have healed him, and he wouldn’t have died.’ That’s pretty impious, but what does Jesus do? He restores Lazarus to life.6 For us, the message is clear: there is a future; there is hope; there is resurrection; there will be a new body in a world without tears.”
“Still,” I said, “evil is a challenge for Christianity too, because God is all-good and all-powerful, and yet there’s so much suffering.”
“Christianity has the best explanation for evil and suffering because of the fall of humanity. Ever since then, the world has been plagued by death, decay, and disappointment. But because Christ experienced the worst of the world and triumphed over it and is now at the right hand of the Father, I know there will be a resurrection, and my wife and I will live in the new heaven and the new earth. Granted, God has not dealt with suffering and evil completely, but we have the assurance that he will. You see, there’s a difference between meaningless suffering and inscrutable suffering.”
“What’s that?”
“Meaningless suffering means that suffering is simply there. It doesn’t achieve a greater good; it has no purpose. Inscrutable suffering means we don’t know what the purpose is, but we have reason to believe that God is providential, loving, and all-powerful. Our suffering may seem meaningless to us, but it’s not. Here’s the point: God uses evil to produce a greater good that could not be achieved otherwise—though we may not understand how, given our finite intelligence and our fallible nature.
“In other words, we have a framework of knowledge about the truth of Christianity, but within that framework are pockets of ignorance. God is infinite and unlimited in power and knowledge and wisdom, and we are not. We should expect that certain things will be obscure for us.”
The Prayer of Relinquishment
“Do you still pray for a miracle?” I asked. “Do you continue to ask God to supernaturally heal Becky?”
“For a long time, we prayed and fasted and prayed some more. We sought out those gifted in healing and spiritual deliverance. We read all the books on healing and tried to follow their advice. But these days, I only pray for a miracle every once in a while. Sometimes I come up behind Becky when she’s eating and hug her. I touch her head and I ask, ‘God, will you go in there and fix this?’ Part of her brain is dying, and it’s terrible. But, no, I don’t pray for a miracle much anymore.”
To be frank, that surprised me. “Then what do you pray for?”
“I pray for wisdom in dealing with all the complications of being a caretaker. I pray for her spiritual well-being and for ways to give her some meaning and happiness.”
“So you’ve lost hope of a healing?” I asked.
“There’s a verse in Ecclesiastes that says there’s a time to give up.7 After we got the diagnosis, I didn’t give up on God, I didn’t give up on Becky, but after a while, I essentially gave up on her being healed. We dropped all the exotic remedies and alternative doctors and I’ve tried to support her as best we can for this sad journey. The Swiss psychiatrist Paul Tournier said that wisdom is knowing when to resist and when to surrender.”8
“Were you tempted to give up on Christianity?”
“No, I think of the time when some disciples departed from Jesus because of his hard teachings, and he asked the Twelve, ‘You do not want to leave too, do you?’ Peter said, ‘Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.’9 I’m not sure Peter understood Jesus’ teaching that day, but he trusted him because of his character and miracles. I ponder that a lot. I know too much to turn back from being a Christian. It’s like the words in that old hymn, ‘I have decided to follow Jesus; no turning back, no turning back.’”
“Do you feel like if you were God, you would definitely heal Becky?”
“That’s fallacious thinking. God is perfect, and he acts accordingly. If I were God, I’d be perfect—and therefore I’d act in the very same way he does. We might not understand why he does what he does, but it’s folly to think we’d do things better.”
I scratched my head. “It’s vexing, though, that God performs healings in some circumstances but not others.”
“Yes. You feel lonely. You feel empty. But God gets the glory one way or the other. He gets the glory when somebody is miraculously healed, and he also gets the glory when someone develops faithfulness and character through suffering.”
“But shouldn’t we always be praying for God’s miraculous intervention?” I asked. “To give up seems . . .” I searched for the right word, not wanting to sound harsh. “Well, it seems a little . . . unspiritual.”
To my relief, he wasn’t offended. “Not at all,” he said. “Remember, I’m not giving up on my faith. I’m not walking away from God. I’m not leaving Becky, and I’m not abandoning hope. But sometimes the most appropriate step when your pleas for healing aren’t being answered is to pray a prayer of relinquishment.”
Catherine Marshall talks about this species of prayer in her book Adventures in Prayer. “There is a crucial difference here between acceptance and resignation,” she writes. “There is no resignation in the Prayer of Relinquishment. Resignation says, ‘This is my situation, and I resign myself and settle down to it.’ Resignation lies down in the dust of a godless universe and steels itself for the worst. Acceptance says, ‘True, this is my situation at the moment. I’ll look unblinkingly at the reality of it. But I’ll also open my hands to accept willingly whatever a loving Father sends.’ Thus acceptance never slams the door on hope.”10
Said Groothuis, “At Gethsemane, Jesus asked the Father to rescue him from the fate of the cross, but his final prayer was one of relinquishment. He surrendered when he could have escaped. He put himself totally in his Father’s hands—whatever his Father had in store for him was
what he wanted for himself. And when healing isn’t coming, sometimes we have to say, ‘Lord, whatever you have in store for me is what I want,’ as difficult as that might be at the time. In a sense, it’s a prayer of obedience, of submission, of trust, of faith.”
I later learned that in the prayer that Marshall models, she suggests confessing if we’ve had a demanding attitude or elevated our personal desires to the point of idolatry or tried to manipulate or bargain with God to do our bidding. “I want to trust you, Father,” she prays. “My spirit knows that these verities are forever trustworthy even when I feel nothing: that you are there . . . that you love me . . . that you alone know what is best for me. . . . So now, by an act of my will, I relinquish this to you. I will accept your will, whatever that may be.”11
I asked Groothuis, “How has praying a prayer of relinquishment changed your attitude toward healing?”
He reflected for a minute, stroking his beard. “Rather than feeling like I’m always beating God with my fists,” he said, “now I feel more like I’m resting in his arms.”
I asked, “When you hear stories of other people being healed, how does that make you feel? Joyful? Jealous?”
“Honestly, both. I try to rejoice with those who experience a miracle, but it’s hard not to say, ‘Why not Becky?’ But I don’t comprehend all of God’s ways. God never gave Job a specific reason for why he allowed his suffering; instead, he revealed his own greatness and power and asked Job to trust him in that light. The best I can do is trust in God’s love and faithfulness—and, as far as I’m able, to smelt meaning out of suffering.”
A Hope Well Placed
By definition, miracles are outside the normal course of events. They’re a supernatural exception to the way the world usually works. Though they’re more common than we may think, they’re still relatively rare—which means that for most people, a sudden and complete healing isn’t going to happen. But that doesn’t mean God is absent. It doesn’t imply that we are cast adrift to face our struggles on our own.
“There’s a line we should walk,” said Groothuis. “We shouldn’t be Pollyannaish. We shouldn’t blithely pretend everything’s okay when it isn’t. If someone asks how I’m doing, I don’t answer with a smile, ‘Dementia is consuming Becky, but no big deal—God will fix her eventually.’ That’s not being authentic. That’s not allowing for grief. That’s not giving space for lament.
“On the other hand, God will fix her eventually. And Scripture promises in Romans 8:28 that God can—and will—cause good to emerge from the difficulties of life, if we’re faithful to him. That sounds like a cliché because at times that verse is casually tossed around in a flippant way. Yes, it’s difficult in the midst of our circumstances to feel that, but let’s not forget something.”
“Like what?”
“That it’s true!” he declared. “In this world or the next, in one way or another, I do have faith that God will bring some good out of Becky’s tragic circumstances. The apostle Paul knew that hope is refined through tribulation.12 Jesus said, ‘Blessed are those who mourn,’13 so I know that God will lift up those who suffer. I trust that what is to come will be better than what is now.”
“So our hope is well placed,” I said.
“Absolutely. Time after time, when I begin to lose sight of that, I go back to apologetics—to the clear and compelling reasons to have confidence that God exists, that Jesus is his unique Son, that the resurrection actually occurred, and therefore his promises to us—promises of hope and eventual healing—are true. I look back over decades of my own personal experiences with God, and I can see how he has blessed me in so many ways.
“Although it has been hard, God has allowed me to see the world through tears, which is maybe the most authentic way to experience it. Mourning has taught me lessons I would never have learned otherwise.”
I glanced around his office, which was bursting with books. There on Colorado’s Front Range, overlooking the magnificent Rocky Mountains, Groothuis still stands in the classroom, teaching the next generation of church leaders how to love God with all their heart, with all their soul, with all their strength—and, yes, with all their mind too.14
His considerable reservoir of knowledge is now topped off with life experiences nobody would wish for themselves, but which have given him new depth, new understanding, new empathy. Unable to rescue Becky, Groothuis has invited God to refine him.
“This campus is so beautiful,” I said. “I can imagine you walking to class and someone calling out, ‘Hey, Professor Groothuis, how are you doing?’ What would you tell them?”
“Well, of course, I’d tell them the truth.”
“Which is . . . ?”
“That I’m hanging by a thread,” he said. “But, fortunately, the thread is knit by God.”
CONCLUSION
Reaching Your Verdict
Adrian Holloway felt trepidation. No, make that reluctance. He was standing in front of more than four thousand people in a British stadium. For the first time, he was going to offer a public prayer asking God to heal the sick.
Like mine, Holloway’s background was in journalism, where he honed a skeptical outlook. He came to faith as a teenager, and when he was later challenged by doubters, he used his history degree from the University of Durham to fully satisfy himself that the resurrection of Jesus rests on solid ground.
After a successful career covering soccer matches for newspapers, radio, and television, he left it all to spend his life spreading Christ’s message of hope and grace throughout his native England and beyond.
But publicly praying for healings? He wasn’t comfortable doing that. His faith was more cerebral than emotional. Besides, surely God would want a purer, holier vessel than him for such a sacred task. And what if nobody was healed? If they were already ill, this might bring even further disappointment. He couldn’t bear that thought.
Sure, he had scoured the Scriptures to assure himself that God is still active in healing the afflicted. But that was a theological exercise. Now, here was the real thing.
The scene was a soccer stadium called Meadow Lane in Nottingham. It was the middle of the summer in 2005. Spiritually curious people had come to hear Holloway talk about what happens after people die, and he certainly felt confident explaining what the Bible says about that—sin, redemption, forgiveness, eternity. But praying for God to heal people before heaven? He had never done that in a setting like this. Yes, reluctance would be a good description of his demeanor.
He drew a breath. He offered the prayer. At the end, he said, “If you’ve been healed, come and tell us.” With that out of the way, he went on to his evangelistic talk. “I had no idea what would happen,” he told me.
Instantly in the crowd, something did happen to a sixteen-year-old girl named Abbi. She knew she had been healed. For a decade, she had suffered from a life-threatening allergy to a protein that would spark anaphylactic shock if she ate an apple or touched rubber. Three times she had to be resuscitated at the hospital. She took medication daily and carried an emergency response kit wherever she went. Her life was severely inhibited, typically anchoring her to home.
Abbi was so confident of her instant healing that she immediately put a latex wristband on her forearm. No reaction. She ate a slice of her cousin’s apple. No reaction. Frantic, her disapproving friends stood ready to call an ambulance if needed.
At the conclusion of the event, Abbi came onto the stage, carrying two of her syringes and an apple. As far as anyone could tell, she had been immediately and totally healed.
This was not some adrenaline-driven emotional response that would fade; a year later she would report, “I am totally well now. I haven’t had a single hive, a single itch, a single tingle. Nothing . . . I am Abbi. I am not the girl with the allergy. I’m free.”
And so, in a sense, was Holloway. From that time forward, he felt freed to offer prayers of healing wherever he went. God has answered many times.
There’s Annie,
whose heart condition called postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome caused her to suffer fainting spells, and who burst into tears as her symptoms instantly disappeared after she received prayer in the name of Jesus. Medical tests confirmed the healing; a year passed and she was still well—and by then pregnant. “I’m a completely different person now!” she exclaimed.
Hannah lacked any hearing in one ear since birth; she was as profoundly deaf in that ear as doctors had ever seen. After prayer, there was complete and spontaneous healing; said the audiologist later, “To go from being absolutely deaf to perfect hearing is something that cannot be explained.”
Edie was confined to a wheelchair for fifteen years from multiple sclerosis, couldn’t speak without mechanical assistance, and needed around-the-clock medical care, yet she was restored to health after prayer. Holloway has a letter from her physician: “I was astonished at her recovery, which appears to be full and unexplained.”
The examples go on and on. Holloway checks out stories as best he can, confirming the character of the person, obtaining medical documentation when available, and recording people’s accounts on video.
“My main take-away is—Wow!” Holloway exuded in a conversation with me. “This is the power of God.”
“How has this experience changed your life?” I asked.
He thought for a moment. “It has strengthened my confidence in the integrity and reliability of the Bible and God’s willingness to act today,” he replied. “It shows God’s compassion—this is immediate evidence of his care for the person he has just healed. And over and over he has used these demonstrations of his power to open hearts to the gospel.”
Holloway has reached his verdict in the case for miracles: God is still supernaturally restoring life and health to the ailing—and every effort on our part to control it or harness it or predict it or fully understand it invariably ends in frustration.