Handling bad news...

I've recently been told that a close friend's wife was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. This comes as a shock, not only because she appeared to be a healthy woman, but also because my friend - who has major chronic disease - always assumed he would die before his wife would. It doesn't look like that's the plan and this comes as a big, painful surprise to everyone.

Bad news, no matter what shape it comes in, is never expected. We can train ourselves to "hope for the best, but expect the worse", but, somehow when it strikes, truly bad news is never easy to deal with. This is the way this news is for my friend and I today. He feels "this is not the way it was supposed to work out" and this sadness over the unexpected turn of events in his life causes him a great deal of grief. But, under the surface of this is an anger...a righteous anger that things ought not go the way they are going and that someone (God) is at fault for this.

Whenever I come in contact with this kind of sadness, I am reminded of the book by Rabbi Harold Kushner called When Bad Things Happen To Good People. This book, that chronicles the struggle his own family went through when their young son was diagnosed with progeria (a disease of rapid aging and premature death). Kushner could hardly stand it. He watched as his son suffered and died way before his time, and he railed against a God who would do such a thing to his small son. In fact, such an event was for Kushner - who was trained as a rabbi and became a spiritual leader for many people - something that shook his faith and forced him to question everything he had ever thought or believed about God.

I will not be ruining the book's experience for anyone here by giving away a central discovery Kushner came to that helped him through this experience. In effect, Kushner challenged the common concepts of an all-knowing and all-powerful God by suggesting that, perhaps, God is no more powerful to correct the course of life than we are. He argued that it could very well be that, once he set the world as we know it in motion, forces took over that were greater than even God's power to control or influence. Once sickness was introduced into the human system, even God could not forestall it's inevitable conclusion.

It's in times like these that I remember Kushner's words. It is somehow consoling to me to know that God is no more capable of taking away ovarian cancer from a relatively young woman than her doctors are. It is somehow satisfying to me to realize that we men and women do what we can to alleviate suffering and hardship, but that there is only so much we can do against forces that seem to live on their own. And, it is enormously comforting to feel the presence of a God who weeps alongside of me as I suffer these things.

I cannot yet tell my friend this...the wound is too raw. But, at some point I will and hopefully, God willing, he will feel the same level of comfort knowing that a very powerful entity walks with him through this pain and grief. This is what I pray for these days.

All the best, Roger W.