My first professor of Philosophy in Junior College dealt with this very issue of anger with God for the loss of his only son. The boy had just finished college and the professor was a Pastor. They did everything right. On the evening before the young man's graduation he was killed in a horrible car accident by a drunk driver. The man became bitterly angry with God left the clergy and became a teacher. When dealing with the issues of evil, free will, and when God doesn't make sense, the professor would ask quietly, "What kind of God would allow this to happen?" In the book "Introducing Philosophy," Robert C. Solomon addresses the issue this way: "How could God have given people free will, knowing-as He must have-that they would misuse it so badly?"
A few weeks ago I sat in our studios across from a man who answered the question classically, yet with his situation it has more substance. Two years ago David and Marie Works headed to their mini-van with their four daughters after church that Sunday. A gunman started shooting at them leaving two teens dead David critically wounded. The book he wrote is on this very subject. We live in an evil world and since the temptation in the Garden of Eden we have a malady that only a Savior can save us from- that is distorted thinking. We live in a selfish world where evil and denial overtakes some individuals and innocent, promising lives are taken. The comfort that this father has in the loss of his two precious daughters is that "they died as martyrs for the cause of Christ."
Mr. Works discussed the cycle of violence and the victim's cycle in this world and the ways to break that cycle. Instead of seeking revenge, the unnatural is to bestow grace on the individual who has inflicted the violence. How does that work with someone who through an addiction or carelessness causes a fatal accident? Robert F. Kennedy broke the news to an inner-city, African American crowd in April of 1968 that Martin Luther King Jr. had been murdered. He was advised not to, but insisted on speaking.
"For those of you who are black and are tempted to ... be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling," he said. "I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man."
This in fact broke the cycle of violence and although RFK may not have known it, he may have saved some lives with delivering the message of reconciliation. God allows us moral latitude and one of our choices is to forgive or to engage in revenge. Robert Solomon goes further, "If we are all good by nature, there would be little question of good versus evil or salvation versus damnation." I think it is interesting that Mr. Works saw that the death of his girls was akin to the martyrs of the faith. Yet there are many people who have come to Christ, back to church, and back to faith, through the power of the Work's testimony. A tragic loss becomes a testimony for the multitude and as the title suggests "Gone in a Heartbeat," and the subtitle, "Our daughters died-but our faith endures."
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