There are lots of ways to ask the question.
Why do bad things happen to good people?
Why do Christians suffer?
Why does God not seem to answer prayer?
Why am I going through this?
Is God still with me?
The answer, which is never going to be complete in this life, boils down to one phrase: life in the in-between.
Philip Logan’s journey led Elaine and I this past week to a hospital room in North Shields, an English town between Newcastle and the North Sea coast.
His story began here:
“On the morning of the 20th of November 2011, I begrudgingly accepted an invitation to go to church. I was 27 years old, with wild dreadlocked hair and filled with anger. I walked into the meeting, which was held in a dated hotel function room in Newcastle, England. That day, the Holy Spirit took hold of me, and I walked to the altar trembling from the power that seemed to be surging through my body..."
What Elaine and I saw the other night was an astonishing and wonderful sight: a roomful of people abandoned in life but now abandoned to God.
For the last few years, we have been in contact with the remarkable ministry of Junction 42 as it reaches out into the prisons of northern England. Our interaction has been with one of the groups established for those released from prison and their friends and partners.
Most of the men and women in the room were known to the police. More importantly, as it turned out, they were known also to God.
Back in 2010, work began on a massive recreation centre in our small city of Owen Sound. Everything was on target until the contractors hit a layer of quicksand.
Work was delayed for the better part of a year while engineers constructed concrete platforms which would carry the weight of the building given the presence of the quicksand. Needless to say, millions of dollars were added to the project’s cost.
If the work had not been done, nothing would have happened for a while. But at some point, the whole thing would have started to tilt or sink.
Behind a frowning providence there hides a smiling face. That’s a line from one of my favourite hymns, God moves in a mysterious way.
Although he wrote it in 1773, it pretty well expresses what happened to us a few days ago.
We had made the long trip to Ottawa to move our two youngest kids to university. We sandwiched this between moving house and leaving for the UK, so we were under a lot of pressure to begin with. There followed three of the most stressful, action-packed days I’ve had in many a year. We had so much to do that it utterly overwhelmed the time and energy available to do it. And inevitably, some things went wrong.
