Something Went Wrong

I didn’t plan to cover this part yet. I wanted to describe about ten or fifteen episodes when I was fortunate enough to see things that I couldn’t explain in a rational manner and then pull in other stories to complement them. After describing all of these events that I couldn’t justify rationally, I figured that I’d write about what conclusions I’ve drawn from them.

That idea went out the window sometime around five o’clock this evening. The devolution of my writing process may have begun when I spent forty minutes this morning talking with a woman trapped in a deep psychosis. Her brain is so sick that she can’t realize she’s sick. The woman is lost in a nightmare of delusional immune diseases and conspiracies. Over the years, she’s lost her husband, her kids, her career, and her home. Our society values her “civil rights” too much to force her to take the treatment that will keep her brain from further breaking down. Montana doesn’t have the combined legal and medical framework to help pull her out of that psychosis. As she spoke, I tried not to think of her chances of making it through the winter.

Or maybe it began yesterday, when I talked with a mother of two about her husband’s bipolar disorder-induced suicide in order to help her deal with her unnecessary guilt. Or maybe it was this afternoon, as I mumbled into the telephone trying to find the right words to help comfort a mother grieving her teenage daughter’s suicide. Or maybe it was some of the personal challenges that I’ve faced recently.

Either way, I decided it was time to bring up the biggest question of spirituality. If there is something beyond what we can see that ties us together and even has the power to affect our individual lives, then why can the world be so horrible and unfair?

If this spiritual realm had the power to warn me to catch Shane before he slipped of the building, why didn’t I get the same voice telling me to take Darcee to the hospital for a full examination when I last saw her two weeks before her death? If this spiritual realm had the power to send me a miracle to pay for my family’s bills, then why didn’t it just cure my wife of her devastating illness?

I don’t have those answers and I don’t think any person has them to the level of specificity that would please me.

The best explanation that I’ve heard came from a former Army sniper with PTSD and TBI. He was haunted by his past and struggled with addictions in the present. While we had coffee one morning, he told me about the simple spiritual revelation that helped him make sense of the horrors he’d seen.

“God didn’t create evil. God didn’t create death and He didn’t intend for us to suffer.”

The veteran’s simple and common sense explanation put the paradox in perspective. It was too deep for me to ever understand, but all that I really needed to know was that something went wrong.

Fundamentalist Christians would point to Adam, Eve, and the snaky Devil. To other denominations that story acts as a metaphor that passes on the basic truth that humanity strayed from the path our Maker intended. Either way, the message is that something went wrong in between creation and the present.

To me, it’s the only explanation for how the spiritual world that I’ve seen do so much good can coexist with a natural reality where there is so much suffering and evil. While that explanation leaves a multitude of mysteries about what actually went wrong, it does provide enough of an intellectual framework to help us look beyond some of the horrors of our everyday lives to something much more powerful and good.

Without that framework, it's pretty hard to see the bigger picture.

For anyone looking for a deeper explanation of what might’ve went wrong. I think that Jesus left another powerful clue in parable of the Tenants and the Vineyard. Luke 20:9-19.