Lovingly Stroked By God?

At the barbecue restaurant as Ginny and I enjoyed our meal, an elderly man walked from a table in the rear of the place gingerly escorting his wife, an obvious stroke victim.

That’s true love, I thought. To care for her in that incapacitated state says more about love that a whole library of romance novels.

Through the plate glass windows where we were sitting, we watched the old man carefully install his wife in the front seat and get her belted in. She could do nothing to help. She acted like a zombie with a lopsided smile.

I expected the old man to get in the car and drive away, but instead he returned to the rear of the restaurant…

He returned to the rear of the restaurant to get his daughter, also a stroke victim in as bad a shape or even worse off than her mother.

Two of them!

This poor bastard was caring for two stricken family members at the same time!

It was painful to watch as he guided the wobbly daughter, a woman in her 30s, through the maze of tables and out to the car to install her in the back seat.

Ginny and I talked about the horror of disability and the depth of love we’d just witnessed. “What kind of God would saddle that old man with two stroke victims,” I asked? “That seems cruel”.

“The Lord didn’t cause the stroke,” Ginny said. “He allowed it to happen”.

Not much difference to the old guy taking care of those women.

Sometimes in telling people about God, I think I’m defending the Indefensible.

Faith does not fly in the face of reason; faith flies in the face of experience.

The love of God is certainly compatible with the dictates of reason; but I have a hard time reconciling the love of God with my own life experience and the experiences of people I see around me every day.

Why doesn’t God just kill us outright, crush us like bugs instead of stroking us with affliction? Wouldn’t that be kinder, more loving?

Is God helpless to prevent the strokes that mother and daughter suffered?

Was it something genetic that runs in that family, a natural phenomena? And God said, “Tough luck. But that’s just the way it goes. What do you expect Me to do about it?”.

I’ve heard Christians explain such things as strokes and famine and disasters as a just punishment on humanity. They say that we each and every one deserve eternal torment now and in the hereafter because we have sinned, and that the fact that some of us live happy, healthy lives is a mercy of God, when in fact we all ought to be stroke victims. They say that vile, nasty sin merits the harshest of punishments, so what do we expect when some people get stroked by God here and now?

I’ve heard other Christians explain stroke victims and the like as God giving the rest of us test cases on which to exercise our charity. How can we show love unless we have some poor bitch to practice on? We can help only if there is someone who needs our help; we should be glad we are stretcher-bearers instead of the slob on the stretcher.

Other Christians tell me that in the long run even stroke victims will eventually realize that God loves them and that He brought tragedy into their lives to lead them to a bright happy future waiting in store for them after they have suffered in frustration and humiliation for years and years and years on earth — someday there will be pie in the sky.

What a crock!

I have no answer myself, but I find such answers as those I’ve heard other people suggest unsatisfactory.

When I was in college a skeptical friend teased me saying that religion is an opiate of the people, that faith is an easy way out of intellectual problems, that Christians refuse to face reality, that we have a Pollyanna view of the universe.

Faith may be a lot of things, but easy it’s not.

To love the Lord thy God when you suspect Him of causing, or allowing,, strokes requires a supernatural gift of faith. A gift He gives.

When I was younger I worked for a while as a hands-on care-giver at different times to three different stroke victims so I have an inkling of what that old man in the restaurant went through to get those two women up, to get them diapered and dressed, to get them down the steps and out to the car, to bring them to a restaurant as a treat, to cut up their meat and feed them by hand, to sop up their spills, to endure the stares of embarrassed other customers, to get them back to the car, and finally to get them back home and lifted into bed.

Such activity on the part of that old man required Herculean effort. He did not have to bring them out for barbecue. He could have spooned them mush at home in front to the tv. But he did all that work to take his ladies out to dinner.

That’s love.

I wonder…

Maybe Ginny and I did not just see an old man escorting stroke victims to his car.

Maybe we saw God.