A Life Formula

Ann LeMott

A famous writer and relatively new Christian says this:  Our preacher, Veronica, said recently that this is life's nature:  that live's and hearts get broken--those of people we love, those of people we 'll never meet.  She said that the world sometimes feels like the waiting room of the emergency ward and that we who are more or less OK for now need to take the tenderest possible care of the more wounded people in the waiting room, until the healer comes.  You sit with people, she said, you bring them juice and graham crackers.

Travel Mercies, p 108

The Origin of Terrible Circumstances

Annie Dillard, a Christian writer says this:

''God is no more blinding people with glaucoma or testing them with diabetes or purifying them with spinal pain or choreographing the seeding of tumor cells through lymph or fiddling with chromosomes than is he jimmying flood waters or pitching tornadoes at towns.  God is no more cogitating which among us He plans to place here as bird headed dwarfs or elephant men or to kill by AIDS or kidney failure or heart disease, childhood leukemia, or sudden infant death syndrome, than He is pitching lightning bolts at pedestrians, triggering rock slides or setting fires.  The very least likely things for which God might be responsible are what insurers call "acts of God"."  So Annie Dillard takes a very strong stand against the notion that we can blame God for the bad things of life.  And I agree with her.