What to Do with the Wounds

Call it News of the Bizarre:

Man admits involvement in conspiracy to slash wife

(Dayton, Ohio) -- An Ohio man has been implicated in a bizarre conspiracy to hire a woman to assault his wife with a knife. According to hospital records, the man, who has no previous criminal record, drove his wife of more than thirty years to an early morning rendezvous, where he delivered her into the hands of Deborah Millett, who over a period of one hour inflicted such serious injuries to the victim that she had to be hospitalized for three days. Questioned about his motives, the man said only that he believed that the attack would be good for his wife. He also admitted that he had never met Millett before that morning and that he had arranged for her to be paid thousands of dollars in exchange for what he called "her services."

The husband visited his wife several times during her hospital stay but never expressed regret for his involvement in the plan. More than six weeks after the assault the victim’s wounds have healed, but doctors say for the next several months she will continue to struggle with fatigue from the severe trauma to her body, even after her wounds have healed. Neither the police nor hospital officials are expected to investigate the attack because Dr. Deborah Millett performed the surgery at Miami General Hospital.


I am happy to report that my wife is doing fine after her surgery.

Yes, I was that man. I drove my dear wife of thirty years to an early morning appointment with a surgeon wielding a sharp knife and arranged for that surgeon to be paid thousands of dollars, all in hopes of my wife's gaining the kind of health and well-being that could be achieved only by going through that ordeal.

I heard a pastor friend once say that surgery is different from most other kinds of medical care. Usually people come out of the hospital feeling better than when they went in. Not so, usually, with surgery. A surgeon wounds to heal, and the patient leaving the hospital often feels worse after the treatment.

It seems odd to me that when we talk about unjust suffering and evil in the world, when we wonder how such suffering and evil could exist in a world created by a wise and good God, it seems odd that we are so quick to excuse God's involvement in that suffering, as if we need somehow to distance Him from the process. God "allows" evil and suffering, we say; He could never actually cause it Himself.

Yet we don't say the surgeon "allows" the cutting of the flesh; the surgeon actually wounds the patient. And we accept without question not only the suffering the surgeon inflicts but also the surgeon's active role in inflicting that pain.

What I learned from my wife's surgery is that if I can trust a highly skilled doctor to wound my wife, I can trust a wise and loving God to inflict (not just "allow") pain in my life. I can give Him permission to hurt me only because I know He's really smart and He really loves me and my loved ones and He will inflict only as much suffering as is necessary to accomplish His purposes, which are always wise and good. I don't need to question or defend His role in that suffering.

He actually does wound us, but He wounds only to heal.

The Suffering of Misunderstanding

Jesus calls us to serve Him by the way of obscurity and misunderstanding, and He has shown us what that kind of service looks like. On the day He died, He was the only one who understood what was actually happening.

The day He died His followers saw catastrophe, and His enemies saw triumph. All of them saw the end of something, they had no way of knowing it was really the beginning of something completely new in the world. On that day only He knew what His death really meant. Part of His suffering was His willingness to be ridiculed as a buffoon or pitied as a martyr.

It is this suffering Jesus who has called us to follow Him, to serve Him in this same way, with this same willingness to be misunderstood.

This kind of suffering is not easy. There is a kind of glory in suffering while people are cheering us on, but that is the privilege of the home team. Christians are not competing in a home game; we know we are in enemy-occupied territory.

Christ-followers must be willing to suffer, in addition to everything else, the embarrassment of being misunderstood. But we would not be the first Christians to be called fools.

The Empty Or Not Empty Tomb of Jesus

All this talk of the Resurrection power of Christ would be only so much poetry and metaphor if Jesus had not actually risen from the dead, if He had not "risen indeed," as Paul puts it. Without a historical event that actually took place in a certain place and at a certain time, an event that occupies a place in the same space-time continuum that I live in, the motive power of the Christian faith is reduced to an ideal like patriotism or an inspiring notion like "the Spirit of Christmas."

But with the empty tomb, faith in this Jesus takes on an entirely different character. The empty tomb forces me to make up my mind about Jesus. Do I believe He actually rose from the dead? Actually rose? Then what does this Resurrection of Jesus mean?

• What does the Resurrection of Jesus mean with regards to His exclusive claims (to forgive sins, to be the only way to God)?
• What does the Resurrection of Jesus mean when I contemplate my own mortality? when I think about the deaths of my loved ones?
• What does the Resurrection of Jesus mean with regards to my future? the future of this planet? 

This take-it-or-leave-it character of the Easter story is obvious even to a secular perspective. As Slate's James Martin observes, "Easter is an event that demands a "yes" or a "no." There is no 'whatever.'"

He's right. This isn't simply a matter of subscribing to a comforting greeting-card philosophy that might make me smile a little. Either the tomb is empty and everything has changed, or He never rose at all and this faith is all a pathetic lie. The Resurrection of Jesus doesn't leave us a comfortable middle ground.

The Threshhold of Dismay

I suppose it would be odd to speak of dismay as a normal part of a healthy spiritual life, but it seems there is surely such a pattern in the lives of the men God has used profoundly: Abraham at the thought of sacrificing Isaac; Moses at the cantakerousness of the Israelites; David as he runs for his life from the king; the weeping Jeremiah; the suffering Paul; even Jesus in Gethsemene. All were dismayed before they saw God work mightily.

This means, of course, that we must discipline ourselves to take the long view when things seem to fall apart. We must never judge the work of God, in our lives or in the lives of those we love, while the paint is still wet on the canvas. In the timetable of God, what looks like catastrophe is often the prelude to great glory and blessing.