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PASSIONATELY COMMITTED

PERSONALLY CONNECTED

Unanswerable Questions

by Bill Mathes

“Why did God take Tod, a man in the prime of his life, devoted to family and to serving God through serving others?”  I am among countless other people who have been asking themselves this question for the past week.  The unanswered and unanswerable question...

As far back as I have memories of anything at all, I have memories of Lee and Susan, Ted and Tod.  We were for the most part inseparable during those hot Athens summers, Ted, Tod, and I.  Distance crept in when school started up, as I was a year younger and learned to keep a respectable space from them and their older friends.  That was no problem, though, as I had other friends my age and I knew that when summer rolled back around I could be the third triplet again.

We practically lived at each other's houses during the summers.  We had a pool, they had a huge back yard and a playroom.  We had Oreos, they had Apple Jacks.  Our house was on the snow cone truck's route, theirs was on a much quieter street in case we needed more space for our games.  We split time at each house, depending on our agenda and mood on any given summer day.  

As I think back on those days, it strikes me how very different life was back then.  It was different in so many ways, but it seems that two ways in particular stand out.  First, not everyone who played a team sport got a trophy.  Participation was a wonderful thing.  Everyone was rightly proud of the participants, but if you were not first place you got a pat on the back and a “Better luck next year.”  Maybe I am wrong, but that seemed just fine to me.  It made you strive to be better, and to work harder, to take home the gold (plastic) next time.  Something else made me strive to be better too:  Ted and Tod.  They excelled in sports, and I knew that if I wanted that trophy my chances would be a lot better if I could manage to be on their team.  But I also knew that I could not just be dead weight along for a free ride to East Texas YMCA glory.  I had to step up.  I had to be better.  They made me better.  

Tod never stopped making those around him better.  Our relationship as adults consisted mostly of an occasional lunch.  During those times we got caught up, sharing about our families and what was going on in our lives.  And every time I walked away from one of those lunches, I felt inadequate.  I knew I had to get my service going.  It was nothing intentional on Tod's part at all.  Not a hint of pride or self-righteousness.  It was just who he was.  He was a servant.  So I knew that if I didn't want to have that feeling after being around him, I had better step up and give more of myself or just stop having lunch with Tod.  And I was not going to stop having lunch with Tod.  I would let him make me a better person and a better servant, because that is what he did.  

The other thing that seems so different is that back then, you did not cry in front of your friends.  Crying in front of your friends was a fate worse than death.  There was only one way you could cry in front of your friends and get away with it. If whatever it was that happened to you was so bad that everyone standing around was in full agreement that they would have cried too, then you got a pass.  “Oh man!  Severed arm!  That's ok, buddy, go ahead and cry it out. If that happened to us we would be crying too.  Just take it over to the sidelines, will ya?  We still have an hour of daylight to play.”  I learned toughness from Ted and Tod.  Because they were tough, and because I knew that being younger I could never let my guard down and show weakness.

Knowing that Tod came up with us under that philosophy, I think that if he were here today he would get a big kick out of knowing that in the past 10 days he made a lot of people cry in front of their friends.  We cried, we cried some more, and then when we were done, we cried again.  We cried alone, we cried in front of strangers, and yes, we cried in front of our friends.  And not one of us cared, because we all knew that a severed arm would have hurt less than it hurt to lose Tod.  And just like someone who has lost an arm, we will never be the same.  Just like someone who has lost an arm, there will always be a sense of loss.  Just like someone who has lost an arm, we will need him and he will not be there.

I would worry about a lot of families that found themselves in the midst of such pain and such loss, but not this family, not the Bushes.  Everyone who knows them could give a reason why, although their heart breaks for them, they will not be worried for them.  I have an example of my own.  On Thursday at the hospital, that awful, terrible Thursday, I overheard Susan talking to someone.  I heard her say, “We prayed and we prayed, and we got our answer.”  A lot of people, perhaps most people, would have said, “We prayed and we prayed, but we didn't get our answer.”  That's because most people equate God answering prayer with them getting what they want.  I am ashamed to say that I fall into that camp far too often.  But not this family.  They are so committed to the sovereign will of God, so submitted to the Lordship of Jesus Christ, that they equate God's answer with their answer.  Period. Regardless of the answer.  So we hurt for this family, we continue to cry for this family, and we continue to pray for this family.  But we do not worry about this family.  

So, what about that question, “Why did God take Tod?”  What do we do with that question, that unanswered and unanswerable question?  I think I know what we should do with it.  We should worship.  We should praise God.  We should exalt and magnify the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ.  Because it really is very simple:  Any god whose every action great and small could be understood by sinful human beings is no god at all.  The God that Tod Bush served is Transcendent.  The God that Tod Bush served is wholly separate.  The God that Tod Bush served is Holy-Separate.  And that is cause for our worship.  And even further, despite His transcendence and “because of His great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions” (Ephesians 2:4-5).  Our loving God bridged the gap that separated us from Him by giving His Son for our redemption.  More cause for worship.  So I think we should let our frustration at not knowing and not understanding drive us to Him in worship.  We should go to our knees and take that question before Him and wrestle with it, wrestle with Him, and I trust that in that way as well we will never be the same.  

Perhaps no passage in Holy Scripture captures this mystery of God better than Paul's doxology at the end of Romans 11:

“Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways!

For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who became His counselor? Or who has first given to Him that it might be paid back to him again?  For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever. Amen.”

The beauty of this passage and of the rest of God's written Word amazes me.  It is abundantly clear that something so beautiful and profound could only be written by man if fully inspired by the Holy Spirit.  We also know that there is a heavenly language that is beyond us, so holy and so true that were we to hear even the slightest utterance of it we would fall on our faces like dead men, as did Isaiah.  And anything that we were able to hear would make no sense to us anyway.  So for now, what is spoken in heaven must remain a mystery to us, with one exception.  I know that at some unknown time on the earthly date of December 22, 2016, one thing was spoken in heaven that would make perfect sense to me:

“Well done, good and faithful servant!  You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things.  Come and share your master's happiness!”