Before the doors opened, I tried to prepare myself for what was about to happen. I looked around the unfamiliar room, appointed with an elegance unfamiliar to me. I noticed the nauseating smell of multiple kinds of flowers melded together. There were rows of chairs lined up expecting company. And then there was the casket.
I tried not to look. There was no need, but I looked anyhow. The casket was just five feet away. It was a powdery steel blue. Inside was my little brother. Mom had chosen a blue leisure suit for his final apparel. His long blond hair was meticulously arranged, as though hiding something.
Mike had just turned 18. In several months he would graduate from high school. But during a spring break trip to Cocoa Beach, Florida, he had been walking along a road. A drunk driver swerved and killed him. And now, here we were. Soon the doors would open and friends and family would enter the funeral home to pay their final respects.
We had grown up in the church. In this tough moment, my spiritual training assured me that God would help us. He would be there bringing comfort and strength.
As the doors to the visitation room opened and people walked in, it never occurred to me that God might be to blame.
It takes stamina to stand for hours next to the casket of your brother and shake hands with a fake smile plastered on your face. Mike was popular at school. As his friends filed past they had nothing to say. They just fought back tears and looked like they would rather be any place but there.
But I struggled with some of the comments from the church people I grew up with.
They meant well. But I wished they would stop talking. How many times did I need to hear, “God has a plan”? Why did they find it necessary to tell me, “We don’t know why God took him, but He knows what He’s doing”? Or, “Sometimes we just can’t figure out why He does the things He does”?
It didn’t hit me all at once. But it started to feel as though the church people were defending the actions of God. Based on what I heard, some of them believed my brother was dead because of God. They believed God was in control and because of that He could’ve saved my brother.
Even worse, it sounded like God might have been driving the car.
I began to wonder what to do with a God who needed defending at my brother’s casket. What about all those Bible verses that promise the protection of God? What do I say to people who brag about how good God is because He delivered them from sickness or bankruptcy or death?
What about my brother?
I glanced down inside the casket. It appeared as though God hadn’t been good to him.
At 23, I didn’t have another way to understand it. I had grown up believing God was on the side of good people. God protected us. God answered prayer. God wouldn’t let us down.
Standing beside Mike’s casket, that certainty began to crack.
I didn’t stop believing in God. But I carried those questions with me into seminary and eventually into pastoral ministry. And yet, during nearly forty years as a pastor, I can’t count how many times I repeated some of those same answers to hurting and grieving people.
I knew the lines. They were the lines Christians were supposed to say.
The church had taught me answers. It had not taught me what to do when the answers stopped working.
Eventually, I gave myself permission to ask the questions I had carried away from my brother’s casket. I began to think for myself and break free from worn-out church platitudes. Some of the answers I once believed didn’t survive those questions.
But God did.
When that happened, I began to see God differently.
That’s one of the reasons I wrote *A God Awful God: The God I Feared Wasn’t the God I Found.*
Nearly fifty years later, I can still see that powder-blue casket. I still don’t believe Mike’s death was part of some divine plan that needed defending.
And I no longer believe God needs me to defend Him.
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