Wednesday, March 25

Today’s Readings: Psalm 75; Lamentations 2:1-6; John 9:1-7; 1 Peter 3:13-22; Psalm 132

Featured Reading: John 9:1-7

One of the most profound moments of my spiritual journey occurred the morning of the day before classes were supposed to begin at the start of my final year of seminary. I was on campus that morning because I was part of a group being trained to facilitate a small group of first year students. The date was September 11, 2001. The planes had hit the Twin Towers and the Pentagon shortly before our training occurred. Needless to say, when our facilitator walked in, our minds were anywhere but in that room. As the facilitator walked in and took her seat, she said: “I know it’s hard for you to think right now, but I have a question to help us regain a bit of our focus. In the midst of the tragedy and horror of this morning, where is God?” It took a while for the first person to speak, but eventually someone spoke. Then another person spoke. And then another. In the course of the next 30 minutes, each of us began to find glimpses of hope in the midst of what had been a paralyzing sense of fear and doubt. That simple question our facilitator raised helped me realize how often I had put the emphasis in the wrong place. When things went wrong in my life, my tendency before that morning had been to ask, “Why did this happen, God?” In other words, my natural response was much like the response of Jesus’ disciples to the blind man. When they encountered the blind man on the street, the only thing they could do was to try to figure out why the man was blind - as if arriving at "an answer" would make the situation less heart wrenching. Over the years, my life experiences have taught me that “why” questions asked within the context of a tragedy rarely – if ever - turn out well since they raise questions our finite minds cannot fully absorb (much less answer). Even in those rare instances when we are able to piece together answers that make some degree of sense to our heads, often our hearts continue to ache with lingering issues that remained unresolved. It’s at just such moments that the “where” question (i.e. “Where is God in all of this?) can be so much more helpful – for the “where” question can take us beyond the confines of our cause-effect way of thinking that Jesus challenged in today’s Gospel reading. If you are wrestling with gut wrenching issues in your own life, today I would invite you to take some of the energy you’ve invested in asking “why” questions and invest some of it in asking the “where” question. See if anything happens for you spiritually as you make this important shift in semantics. Til next time…