Letters from Lettie
"Did the little girl die because her parents didn't have enough faith?"
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Lettie's first letter
Hi Andy,
I've just read your amazing thoughts on Job and suffering. And I want to say a very big thank you!! It was extremely good for me and my soul.
(Click here to read article on Job.)
I often struggle with the issue of faith. If I ask our Lord for something, how can I truly believe that He will answer my prayer if I do not know whether or not it is his will to give it to me? I am so aware that his thoughts are not mine - that he is so amazing, so great, so much more than human - he is GOD. He knows the future and many things that I am not aware of. Even Jesus prayed, “Not my will, but thine.” He must have known that what he wanted in Gethsemane would not be given to him. So how can I believe that what I ask will be given? My problem is that whenever I ask God for something - even a spiritual thing like making me more aware of His presence - I am not sure that I truly believe that I will receive what I ask.
Am I silly? Am I talking in circles? Or maybe like an unbeliever? Thank you that I can share this with you.
Love to you and Wendy,
Lettie
Andy's reply
Dear Lettie,
Thank you for your lovely, thoughtful letter.
I have not yet written anything specifically on faith. There is a small section on faith on the Tuesday video of last week of Jesus' life.
With regard to your questions… Gordon Cosby (not Bill Cosby!!) an American pastor who had quite an influence on my life said, "It is sometimes better to ask good questions than to give good answers." I actually feel that about your questions. You have given a lot of honest questions that many people ask, but you have asked them in a reverent, faith-filled way.
It would be lovely if we could have clear-cut answers to all of these questions, but Christianity doesn’t work that way. It’s full of paradox and mystery. A missionary to Muslims told me that one of the attractions of Islam was its absence of paradox. It is a very simple and clear-cut religion – do these five things and you will be saved. But our faith is not like that.
I think God asks us to live with paradox and antinomy.
Paradox is a seemingly absurd or contradictory statement or proposition which when investigated may prove to be well-founded or true.
Antinomy describes the contradictory results that take place when we apply our rational/empirical methods to the transcendent universe. Our methods work well when applied to the physical world. But there are transcendent spheres of the universe where empirical reasoning cannot establish rational truths, because they go beyond what we are able to perceive with our mind or with our senses. The key word here is "transcendent." Wherever the transcendent meets the human, there will be paradoxes and antinomy. It cannot be avoided.
It's wonderful that we have Jesus praying in Gethsemane and asking for the cup pass from him, when he knows that it cannot. We see him wrestling with antinomy, and we see the agony that it caused him. At that moment he was being fully human.
So my answer is: “Yes, if we pray in faith, our prayers will be answered. And yes, there are times when they will not be answered however great our faith.” That's the paradox. And living with that paradox is very close to the essence of the life of faith.
And I don’t think you are talking a bit like an unbeliever. Quite the contrary: living with these tensions and yet keeping your faith is a sign of a truly engaged Christian.
Blessings as you engage,
Andy
PS - We mustn’t confuse antinomy with antimony, which is a silver-white poisonous metal, hard, but easily broken - scarcely what we want in our faith!
Lettie's second letter
Hi Andy,
Many thanks you for your reply - I think your answer is what I expected it to be. It is just that I sometimes wonder whether my faith is strong enough - especially when I hear people saying “You just don’t believe enough.” I’m exercised about the passage where Jesus says, “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, nothing will be impossible for you.”
I shall always remember how powerless and inadequate I felt when one of my pupils in grade 4 went down with Leukaemia. Why is it always the lovely sprightly ones? She was seriously ill from the start. Her parents had money and tried every possible remedy. We all prayed constantly for this little girl, but still the disease advanced. At last her parents went to a so-called faith-healer who claimed that when he prayed, illness just stopped, and the sick person "got up and walked."
The bitter end of the story is that he prayed with them at the child's bed, and promised that she would begin to get better in the next day or two. But a week later she succumbed to the disease. Her parents were devastated. And the first thing the preacher told them was that their faith had not been strong enough, and that if they had really believed, then their daughter would have been up and healthy instead of dead. Needless to say her Mom ended in an institution and her Dad was never the same again. I felt so inadequate to help, and to bring them back to Jesus whom I knew was waiting for them with wide-open arms. I knew that I could never stand in their shoes. I did not know how to help them. Maybe when you see someone floundering in sorrow and regret it’s better to just sit with them and be with them.
I lost a son when he was 6 months old. He was so ill. I did not know why, or what Jesus wanted to teach me. I only prayed that God would heal him if that were in his plan, and, if it was not, please to take him back to him quickly. God did neither. My boy suffered for 6 long months. Every now and then they called me to get back to the hospital as quickly as possible because they were sure he was nearing the end. So I would go, thanking God that at last he was going to end my baby’s suffering! I would get to the hospital and hold him - emaciated, suffering and struggling to breathe. He would fall asleep in my arms, and next morning he would still be with us. Later in the day, I would go home to wash and eat, and to take care of my older son. That evening when I got to the hospital, the little one would look much brighter! And would I say, “Thank you Lord - maybe he is going to get better.” But a week later, the whole agonising process would happen again..
Sometimes I felt as if God was - if I may say so - playing with me. And sometimes I wondered was he testing me and my faith, or my love for Him. They were such difficult times. Many of my family and friends asked unending questions: “Why? What is God doing?’ I can honestly say I never ever asked why. I do not know why, but I never asked any such questions of our Lord. The night my boy was at last taken back to Jesus, I could not stop saying, “Thank you - thank you for delivering him from pain and struggle.” And I went home and to bed, knowing that my son was in loving arms of Jesus, feeling well and healthy, and not struggling to breathe.
All that is now 50 years ago, and not a day goes by that I do not think of him. And it seems that the older I get, the more I miss him, and wish I knew what he would have looked like now. But God is so full of mercy and love to me - I still have no bitterness and I praise him for that.
I don’t not know why I told you all this. Maybe because, in spite of what I experienced, I still did not know how to help my pupil's parents. And so often I have no satisfactory answers for others. How do we help friends and others to be prepared for things that can come their way? How can we help them to stand strong in the name of Jesus and to know that, no matter what, he is with us - in even the most awful and unthinkable circumstances? Of course talk is always cheap!
Thank you so much for your letters, and for all the lovely stories and teachings on your wonderful website. I’ll be praying that others will look at it.
Take care of yourself and may you and Wendy and your whole family stay well and protected and safe.
Love,
Lettie
Andy's reply
Dear Lettie,
First, let me say how very sorry we are to hear the story of your son. What a pain to bear. Through my years of the ministry I have often felt that the worst pain of all is the pain of the mother who has lost a child. I have no idea what that pain is like, and have no wish to find out. Well done in how you have kept going through all these years with a steady faith in spite of the pain.
There are so many things to which I have no answers. But one thing I am sure of – God was not playing with you. I am also convinced that the fact that your son was not healed had nothing to do with the size of your faith. The parable of the mustard seed is often misinterpreted. The whole point is that a mustard seed is tiny. Surely the point of the parable is not that we must muster big faith, but that if we can just give God a tiny bit of faith, he can do wonders with it. It is not the size of our faith that leads to the miracle.
God was not playing with you. He might have been testing you, which is a very different thing. I am certainly not saying that God would cause a child to die in order to test someone. Never - that would be playing with us. But sometimes he uses circumstances to test or refine us. After forty years in the ministry, I sometimes think that God allows the most testing where he sees the most gold. God may have been testing you to bring out the gold he saw in you.
Or God may not have been testing you at all. Remember Christopher Reeve – the actor who played Superman and later broke his neck while doing horse-jumping? He gave an excellent answer to the problem of suffering. He said, "I chose to go horse-riding, and in doing so, I undertook to face the risks that are inherent in it. I made a choice. I chose to engage with the forces of this world. Something went wrong, and the laws of physics did the rest. It is unreasonable of me to blame God for it. He doesn't give us immunity from the laws of nature around us. If he did, we would just be robots surrounded by cotton wool. He gave us choice, and allows us to live with the consequences of our choices. I for one don’t want him to remove that gift of choice – it is the essence of life. The important thing is not that God does not deliver us; it is that God is with us whatever happens." (My own paraphrase – I don't have a copy of his actual words.)
May God continue to bless and heal you of your pain even these 50 years later.
With regard to the story of the girl with leukaemia:
I am not a violent man – I've never hit anyone (except perhaps my brother who was seven years older than me, so I never got very far in that direction!) But the one thing that makes me want to turn to violence is when some well-meaning saint comes into a sick room and tells the sick person that if they had only had enough faith they would be healed. I saw many people through the grace of Christ coping victoriously with their illness – even encroaching death - only to lose their victory because someone told them they were not having enough faith. There is a cruelty there that should be punishable by law - it is as serious an abuse as if they had come in and punched them with their fists. Facing death with equanimity and victory is surely one of the great marks of a Christian, and to take that victory away from someone is a sin.
In Luke 5 the friends of a paralyzed man let him down through the roof for Jesus to heal him. The passage says, "When Jesus saw their faith he said to the man, ‘Get up, pick up your mat and go home’." When he saw their faith – not the faith of the sick man –he healed him. Someone with cancer or with a dying child is at such a low point, that it is cruel and unreasonable to tell them they must have more faith. Surely it is the responsibility of the saint coming into the sick-room to have faith on their behalf, rather than cajoling them to have more.
There is the great story in 2 Kings 4 where a Shunnamite woman hasn’t got enough faith to believe for her barrenness to be healed. When Elisha tells her she will have a son within a year, she says, “O man of God; do not lie to your servant.” So much for big faith! Yet a year later she is suckling a son. God can and does bless us with more than our faith can stretch to, and his actions are not set by the size of our faith.
I'm sorry you didn't feel able to find words to help the parents of the girl who died. You have a great deal to give to people like them: you can stand in their shoes because you’ve lost a child yourself. You have lived through the worst and have kept the faith. And, because you’ve been there, you would know whether it is better just to sit with them and wait until they ask for words. And when you speak, your words will never be cheap because they come from a deep place of suffering.
Every blessing.
Love from both of us,
Andy