When Life Stops Making Sense

Twenty-five years ago, I sat in a classroom in New Jersey. The morning was crisp, blue, and beautiful. We were just getting started with a new school year. Early in the day, news started rushing through the halls about an airplane that had just hit a building in the city.

A few months earlier, I had read H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds and learned about Orson Welles’ famous radio adaptation, which some listeners mistook for an actual news broadcast. As kids passed the news through the hallways, I wondered if we were falling for some kind of radio-show prank. That sort of thing wasn’t unheard of at the time.

We all know that the events that unfolded next that morning were far from a prank.

In my next class, we watched the second plane hit live on television. We watched in horror as the buildings fell. Our school released students halfway through the day, and I walked to my father’s church up the street so we could open the building for prayer. It didn’t take long for the smoke from the city to become visible over our town.

I think all of us who lived in or near Lower Manhattan in 2001 carry varying levels of grief from that September morning. Many here in our church were directly impacted. They worked nearby. Their loved ones were in the buildings. Twenty-five years later, the memories are still raw.

Tragedy has a way of making us search desperately for an explanation. We asked lots of questions, “Why did this happen?” “Why them?” “Why us?” We asked those questions 25 years ago. Sometimes that search for an explanation turns into an assumption: “If something this terrible happened, someone must have done something to deserve it.” I remember recoiling when a popular preacher proclaimed that the attacks were God’s judgment upon America for its sins.

This Sunday, we see a victim of unspeakable tragedy wrestle with that same instinct. She’s also wondering, “What did I do to deserve this?” as she watches her beloved son approach death. Elijah scoops the boy up, takes him to his room, and asks the Lord, “O Lord my God, have you brought calamity even upon the widow with whom I sojourn, by killing her son?” This woman had obeyed. God had miraculously provided for her, Elijah had followed God’s direction to her home. Still, tragedy came.

How do we, as people tasked with speaking for God, respond when obedience leads somewhere confusing? Where do we turn when life stops making sense? Can God continue to be trustworthy when our suffering arises, even in the middle of His provision? This Sunday, join us as we continue the story of Elijah and discover what faith looks like when life stops making sense.