Thanks?

At the start of this year, I read some blogs by Christians who were giving thanks for events that had happened in their lives in 2009, and I thought about whether I could write such an entry. The obvious challenge is to decide what it means to give thanks in the face of a terrible event, and whether I ought to be thankful for anything connected with Jen's death.

One approach is start by examining my expectations. Part of my sadness in Jen's death relates to our previous hope that she had decades of life ahead of her. In other centuries, or indeed even in other places in the world, forty is a reasonable age to reach. Instead I could be thankful for every day that I do live, and every day that Jen lived, and not regard us as entitled to anything. I could focus on the 5800 days we were married, rather than the years we won't have anymore. There's some of this in Job's first response to tragedy:

Naked I came from my mother's womb,
and naked I will depart.
The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away;
may the name of the Lord be praised.

I have a lot of sympathy for this attitude, and it helps me to focus on the good that we did experience. The danger is that it could slide into fatalism - we must accept whatever happens - and it doesn't always face the true evil of death. Worse still, I could end up thinking that if I truly deserve nothing, then I should be grateful for even the tiniest elements of good in the most painful experience - almost (I know this is extreme) like someone living in a very abusive relationship.

Another approach is to see Jen's death as part of some grander plan of God, the details of which are not available to me, so that I could still thank God for an apparently evil event because I trust that it's part of a complex good. Intellectually it's hard to reject this idea entirely, because the death of Jesus is just such an event - on the surface an appalling waste of an astounding life, but in reality a means of bringing great good. However that doesn't have to be true of all deaths. Emotionally, it's hard to accept that there's any immediate good that could ever be enough to justify Jen's death, and there are certainly many bad outcomes already apparent. I have trouble with those who, in similar tragedies, insist on identifying the good outcomes that to them justify the apparent evil. One of the lessons of Job is that reasons if they exist may be entirely hidden from us, or even perhaps beyond our comprehension. God's final response to Job is almost a refusal to answer: I made the world and you didn't, so what do you know about anything?

Another part of my unease with this approach is that it assumes that God has a fairly direct relationship to evil. Jen and I both took the view that cancer is one of those things that happen when you live in an imperfect and messed-up world. God's purposes don't depend on controlling the microscopic details of every event (and so being directly behind cancer). I trust that God is powerful enough to achieve his purposes and keep his promises without such micro-control.


A third approach is to complain to God about evil events: this is frequently seen in the Old Testament, in the prophets and especially the Psalms. Although this initially seems to indicate a lack of trust in God, it can often indicate the opposite. It's because they trust the goodness of God's character, and his power, that they protest to God when events seem to mock these beliefs. Elements of this attitude make sense to me, because it leaves a place for expressing my genuine unhappiness what what's happened, for railing against the waste and brutality of death.

So in summary I do see an important role for thanks for what we have, as long as it coexists with outrage at the evil of Jen's death, and trust in God's ultimate goodness and power to bring about his promises. I've tried your patience more than enough, dear reader, so next time I'll try to list some things for which I am thankful in 2009.