Close calls
Monday February 18, 2008
Categories: Varia
Julie was driving home from a birthday party with Lucas on Saturday, when she phoned me from the car. She said she'd just been motoring south on the expressway when she heard the screech of brakes behind her. When she...
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About Crunchy Con
Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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and just think of those 50 some who didn't survive their close calls with tornadoes recently...
I'm sure they were mostly good people...
in contrast, say, to that sex offender who just recently won a $10 million lottery prize...
he of course had to survive any and all of his close calls to get to that place in his life...
yes...
it might be even harder to leave the house in the morning...
when it is considered how the Absent God does nothing about protecting anyone...
faith hope love joy peace to all...
Are ellipsis dots grounds for banning? Anyway. The bit about the gun reminds me of an old proverb: trust in God but lock your car.
"Are ellipsis dots grounds for banning?"
All I know for sure is that semicolons aren't; a good thing, as I overuse them constantly myself.
However, "godisaheretic's" point reminds me of the verse from Matthew's Gospel: "But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust."
Sometimes good people suffer; sometimes they are spared. Sometimes the evil suffer; sometimes they are spared. The mystery behind this won't be solved in our lifetimes, but we can rejoice when God spares us or those we love from danger or death, and we can offer our pain back to Him with loving resignation when we are asked to carry a cross of suffering.
godisaheretic, after an accident when I was 12 years old, the doctors told my parents that, because I was not going to regain consciousness, there was no sense in tying up the resources of the emergency room; that all my folks could do was pray because it was just a matter of hours.
So they did. I was told later that my Dad (who may never have seen the inside of a church before then, and who was the toughest man ever to walk the face of the earth--he feared no living man or thing, except snakes), was on his knees in the hospital corridor outside the emergency room.
When the doctor came to work the next morning, I was still alive, so he took me into the emergency room. A couple of days later I was "out of the woods." Don't tell my parents or the thousands of doctors who witness medical impossibilities--miracles--all the time about your Absent God.
And, no, you can't tell Him when or how to work special miracles just for you; you can't put God to the test. Like you, maybe, I've tried as hard as it's humanly possible to do; He saved me but later took the love of my life--a beautiful, innocent flower of 24. I tried a thousand times to trade my life for hers, but He would not. I know it's just for a relatively short time before we're together again, but how people like you get through such times is something I wouldn't want to experience.
He wrote His existence on your heart and into your reason, but if you choose to disregard it and consider yourself a modern-day Cheetah, so be it.
Because you hang around a blog full of believers you seem to be trying to learn something about He Who Isn't There. That's a good thing. If you have the brain for it, sneak off by yourself and read Aquinas about the proofs of God's existence. If you're a mere mortal, read the Confessions of St. Augustine.
faith hope love joy peace to all..., especially you , my friend.
I liked the part about your sister having a pistol and knowing how to use it. Which brings to mind a question that turns over in my mind from time to time.
Should I obtain a carry permit and a handgun? Will I someday be in a time and place in which I could save lives if I were armed?
Irenaeus, have you heard the Spanish version of that saying? "A Dios rezando y con el mazo dando", which translates something like "Praying to God while wielding the club". It's a bit more... er, proactive, shall we say, than it's English counterpart.
The beauty of the randomness that is life.
We can either accept the randomness and appreciate the beauty of it or we can wallow in the reasoning of the why of it all. Wallow is the best way I know of defining the getting stuck in the why. We all spin our wheels a bit when we get hit with the finality that random can present but some of us insist on staying there for whatever reasons.
I work construction. A lot of times it's with heavy equipment. I don't believe a week goes by where a maybe hits close enough to make me consider the what ifs. The last one that I can recall right now was a boom from a tractor crashing down less than a foot from my hand. The operator turned white and I had to appreciate the moment. My life would be really really different without a right hand and that was what would have been lost.
The problem with the divine design line of thought is few people consider that if the divine spared one then he took the other. That why will take you where no person was meant to go.
The beauty of the randomness that is life.
Oh, I don't agree at all. At all. This is, I think, the philosophical stance taken by the next-door neighbor kid in "American Beauty," and indeed by the film itself (though I didn't understand that clearly when I reviewed the film; I thought the film's final betrayal was to mock this worldview, but it turns out the screenwriter endorses it). It is a terrible, terrible thing that innocents should die. That we live in a world in which a serial killer can strangle women, and a tornado can kill a family as it sleeps in its bed, is to my mind the only serious argument against the existence of an all-good, all-powerful god. I pray that God will have special mercy for those who, overwhelmed by suffering and injustice, cease to believe in Him. There is nothing beautiful about a tornado choosing to go this way instead of that way, or a murderer deciding to knock on this door instead of that one. Mysterious, yes, but beautiful, no.
The problem with the divine design line of thought is few people consider that if the divine spared one then he took the other. That why will take you where no person was meant to go.
Actually lots of people think about that. Any intellectually serious Christian, Jew or Muslim -- people who believe in an all-good, all-powerful god -- has to confront this conundrum. There's an entire branch of theology, called "theodicy," dedicated to investigating the problem of evil in a universe ruled by an all-good, omnipotent deity. In the Bible, the Book of Job is a narrative about theodicy. Ultimately the only satisfactory answer, at least to me, is "He moves in mysterious ways." The Christian hope is not that one will avoid suffering, but that the suffering one inevitably encounters has ultimate meaning, though that meaning may not be fully discernible in this life.
Close call for the Barrett household this last Sunday:
We're doing laundry. We take a basket of clean clothes into the TV/library overflow/music room, and set it down in front of the couch. Rather than fold them right there and then, however, we decide to go clean the bathroom. While doing so, we suddenly hear a thunderous crack and crash from the TV room; I wonder if a bookshelf hasn't collapsed under its own weight or the television committed suicide. No -- instead, we see this:
http://leitourgeia.wordpress.com/2008/02/17/ways-you-dont-expect-to-spend-your-sunday-afternoon/
My wife is always complaining that we procrastinate when it comes to certain tasks; in this case, it appears to have saved our lives. Go figure.
(For those of you who might remember me complaining about this, it was the exact same Sunday in February on which I fell and broke my ankle last year. This seems to be a day prone to the snapping of limbs.)
Richard
Ultimately the only satisfactory answer, at least to me, is "He moves in mysterious ways."
I would also add this little tidbit. If God were to omnipotently eradicate all trace of evil, we, too, would be eradicated. Sin is the problem. Our personal, private sin. And, if we take the line of Elder Zosima in The Brother's K, our sin is the cause of not only our own suffering and the suffering of others, but also of the whole world.
This reminds me of an absolutely awesome quotation from Garrison Keillor's broadcast story "Letter from Jim". The context is that a man who is bored in his marriage is waiting for a co-worker to pick him up for a business trip, someone he is thinking he might begin an affair with.
...I thought, "So this is what adultery is like. Simple." I sat down in the front yard under our spruce tree and waited for her to pick me up...
I believe that men and women can part for many reasons, including the lack of love and appreciation. I left my parents for my wife because she appreciated me and they didn't. Twenty years later I sit in my own front yard, waiting to join a woman who appreciates me more. But in five years, or six, or eight, will I go to a higher bidder? What happens when I'm older and my grade falls? Who do I choose when I'm old and can't run fast and nobody chooses me? I sat there in the front yard and thought, "So this is what adultery is like. It's just horsetrading."
As I sat on the lawn looking down the street, I saw that we all depend on each other. I saw that although I thought my sins could be secret, that they would be no more secret than an earthquake. All these houses and all these families, my infidelity will somehow shake them. It will pollute the drinking water. It will make noxious gases come out of the ventilators in the elementary school. When we scream in senseless anger, blocks away a little girl we do not know spills a bowl of gravy all over a white tablecloth. If I go to Chicago with this woman who is not my wife, somehow the school patrol will forget to guard an intersection, and someone's child may be injured. A sixth-grade teacher will think, "What the hell", and eliminate South America from geography. Our minister will decide, "What the hell, I'm not gonna give that sermon on the poor." Somehow my adultery will cause the man in the grocery store to say, "To hell with the health department. This sausage was good yesterday, it certainly can't be any worse today."
Oops. Those last two paragraphs should have been italicized as well. Sorry if that confused anyone.
We are closer theologically (in the big picture, if not the minutiae) than I might have thought, Rod.
Thanks, Kristen M, that did a lot to erase the distaste for Keillor that I've developed over the past ten years or so in response to his rather bitter political tirades.
I think Rod's response to Harvey re theodicy is very good. But there is a variant of Harvey's assertion ("...where no person should go...") that seems correct: don't try to puzzle out why a specific thing happened. I can think of a number of moderate-to-severe catastrophes, with results ranging from broken bones to the death of a completely innocent person, that happened as a result either of some seemingly inconsequential and unconnected action, or at worst a moment of inattention. They're the inverse of incidents like the one Richard Barrett describes above: the couple does sit down to fold the clothes, and the limb does fall on them. Or of the one Harvey describes.
Why the victims in those scenarios were chosen truly is a puzzle that will only make you crazy if you persist in trying to solve it.
"Should I obtain a carry permit and a handgun? Will I someday be in a time and place in which I could save lives if I were armed?" dono
That depends on your makeup. Two types of people should not. The first is the type of person who would rather stand by and see his family raped and/or murdered for the sake of not personally contributing to violence. That's the type who not only turns his own other cheek (which is fine), but turns the other cheeks of his loved ones, too.
Personally, I've seen too much horror and pain in my life to standby and allow more of it if I could prevent it. Therefore, I've had a concealed carry permit since they first became available. Unless you live in one of the unconstitutional Democrat gulags, like occupied D.C., you have a right to have a gun handy at night in the bedroom. And remember, you are not murdering a person committed to mayhem--he is forfeiting his own life. Jesus didn't say to turn the other cheeks of your loved ones; to be like the bad shepherd who turns and runs away when the wolf comes. He told his followers to carry swords, obviously not to live by them but for their own self defense.
The second type of person who should not have a gun is the type who doesn't know how and/or is to afraid to use one properly. That type is apt to harm himself or do something stupid like leave a weapon accessible to a youngster.
I just had a major close call yesterday. I was driving from Dallas, TX to Atlanta, GA along I-20. I was just east of Birmingham, AL when an L shaped piece of metal fell off a pre-fab home and flew toward my car. The thing was headed straight for my windshield and my head. I swerved enough that the metal hit my hood and bounced over my roof. Because of traffic and construction, I could not pull over immediately. I went to the next rest stop and surveyed the hood. That piece of metal managed to punch a hole straight through the trunk about 2 feet from the driver's side of the windshield. I took it to a body shop and the whole hood has to be replaced. It was a very close call, if that had hit my windshield and/or head, I would have been with Jesus today.
It punched a hole in the hood, not trunk.
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