There's Not a Reason for Everything

“There’s not a reason for everything.”

One key to learning to live the porpoise driven life is realizing that there’s not a reason for everything. A few days after starting to write this opus, I was struck by a breaking news story in the background of my living room. After spending a the requisite 4 minutes finding a sofa cushion to house my bowl of grape nuts and locating the remote in the ass crack of my recliner, I honed in on the news story. Dolphins had just made an evolutionary leap. A dolphin in Orlando had just developed the ability to blow bubbles. The video footage was impressive. With his mouth, the dolphin had created a large ring-like bubble and was bouncing it to and fro with his bill, beak, mouth, whatever. The dolphin swam its way keeping the bubble bouncing in front of him like David Beckham with a Voit on his way to earning his 10 million dollar contract with another goal. Soon, however, the bubble burst, to both the frustration and delight of the dolphin. The news’ story continued by declaring that, surprisingly, all the other dolphins in the tank picked up on the trick and soon were producing and playing with their own bubbles. Soon, the tank became a bubble bath with more bubble’s being blown than in a 7th grade science classroom with no teacher and a case of Bubblicious. Of course, the questions and commentary from the dolphin community began to explode. Why did they do this? How did they develop bubble making ability? What does it all mean? Surely this is an evolutionary breakthrough of some kind. I’m no biologist, but I think even Chuck Darwin would be hard pressed to prove that bubble blowing was somehow a necessary step in the dolphin quest for survival of the fittest. The truth is who knows why the dolphin bubbling and who cares? Odds are there are that is no reason why the dolphins started blowing bubbles except maybe the reason that one of them simply realized that he could. This should just be a great opportunity for marine biologists to stop taking themselves seriously, pull up a Sea World lawn chair, and enjoy the show.
Accepting some things as happening without reason is easy for us. No reason needed for why there are Braille letters on drive-thru ATM machines, or why we park in a drive way and drive on a parkway. The problem comes when something catastrophic happens in our lives. Then we soon begin to tell ourselves that there must be some reason for it. How could anything this bad happen for no good reason? As a chaplain, I’ve logged many hospital hallway miles and been with hundreds of families at the time of death of a spouse, father, or child. Many of these deaths are sudden, tragic, and sometimes even medically unexplainable. Hardly a death goes by that someone doesn’t search for the reason that something like this happens. Some are what we call “good deaths” where the patient has been sick forever and now the reason for the death is clear to the family. “God didn’t want him to suffer anymore.” “Now, he’s in a better place.” Other situations don’t present the family or the staff with such easy answers. A teenager is brain dead from a car wreck. A young father of three has an aneurism. Other tragedies raise the reason question every day. A house burns down. A retirement fund disappears. A family dissolves. These events sooner or later send us scrambling for answers as to why. Surely, there must be a reason? We say we don’t know it yet and may never know it, but God has a reason for all this bad stuff. The truth is there may not be a good reason. Or if there is, you and I are probably not going to know it for years. It is a scary proposition to think of the possibility of random, inexplicable, bad events happening to us or someone we love for no good reason. But this is exactly the world we bargained for when we attached ourselves to that uterine wall. The universe is full of beauty, life, and harmony. But it is also full of randomness, accidents, and uncertainty.
Two major natural tragedies took their toll on our souls this decade. The first happened on December 26, 2004. Suddenly the earth’s crust under the Indian Ocean couldn’t take it any more and went on a killing spree. The second largest earthquake ever measured pushed its way into the ocean around it and the result was a wave of tsunami that ultimately claimed the lives of 225,000 people in Southeast Asia. Having spent a formative year and a half in Thailand doing volunteer mission work and teaching, I was particularly troubled by this heinous act of Mother Nature. Not long after the tragedy struck, well-meaning religious people felt the need to either find deeper meaning in this nightmare or cover God’s butt for sleeping on the job. Various theological justifications emerged. They ran the gamut from God’s punishment of Indonesia for having the largest Muslim population in the world, to this being a clear sign that God was fed up with all of us. Now he is finally beginning to destroy the global house of cards he created 4000 years ago. The mounting death tolls, the destruction of villages, the orphaned children, all began to create a tsunami of its own in my own soul. I could quickly fend off the moralistic explanations of many of my fellow Christians, but I couldn’t muster up any better reasons. There is no comfortable position when something like this happens. The liberal is just as bankrupt as the conservative. There’s no easy answer or clever song that can get us out of this one. John Lennon and Toby Keith find themselves floating in the same silent boat in this tsunami of meaninglessness. The best we can do as people of faith is to admit that we are forced to decide between or reconcile three very unpleasant truths.

God lost his cool and exercised his capricious judgment by drowning hundreds of thousands of people just because they were near the water, while I got to sleep in my safe, dry home, and enjoy the holidays with my family.
God didn’t do it, but “allowed” it to happen. That is, God was sitting on his hands, couldn’t get to the remote fast enough, or just didn’t give an Asian rat’s fanny.
God is in fact not in control of natural stuff like this. It just happens and he experiences the consequences too and grieves just as we do.

You won’t find in this Sunday’s Joel Osteen sermon, but sometimes we have to choose which truth is the least appalling to us: A God who is sometimes angry and unfair, a God who doesn’t care enough to intervene, or a God who is powerless to stop some bad stuff that just happens. The truth probably lies in some dynamic combination of these options Admittedly, none of these theological positions is very easy to sleep with, but unless we are prepared to defend one of these views in the face of major tragedies that happen to those around us every day, we better keep our mouths shut.
Hurricane Katrina rolled into our coast in 2005 providing the U.S. with our own domestic tsunami. However, enough has been said about Katrina and I don’t have time to cut myself today, so let’s move on to something a little lighter and happier.. Let me close this chapter by saying that while there is not a reason for everything bad that happens, there is a reason for why many things happen and learning to wait and learn that lesson is a huge part of learning to live life well. Meanwhile, don’t forget to mindlessly enjoy your dolphin bubbles.