Where Is God?

                                                (When Tragedy Strikes)

In the face of tragic loss, we likely will turn to these questions: where is God, and where was God when this happened?  If we are at all realistic, we may even feel it is a preposterous matter to even understand where God was then, and what where he is standing now, or what he wants us to think about our situation. We feel it is only honest to believe that it all just doesn't make sense. That God's purposes are beyond our comprehension. And so we feel we must move ahead without understanding  just where God is, or was in the unfolding of our tragedy.

Even more for me to set this up as to our typical response may seem like there are alternative ways of thinking to which I have some insights. No, I do not have answers for the whole  thing of meaning of tragedies. I cannot guess what God's purposes are. I may even wonder if he has an overarching or specific purpose in tragedy. Like, why was my oldest nephew killed in a car accident soon after his 18^th birthday when his life was just unfolding? Why did God let it happen? We tried to make sense, like some good must come out of it or it wouldn't have happened. We grasped for meaning, but I still have no good and satisfying answer for that loss.

Perhaps another focus may be to ask where is God now as he sees our grief. How does he feel about it? What does he want us to know about him at this point? One would think we just have to use our imagination and creative thinking if we have any at all. I like to think of another tragedy, the greatest of all time in history, and think of what God was feeling and thinking in that unfolding. How did God feel when he saw his own son hanging and left to die on that instrument of death, the cross? God so loved the world, that he went through that intense suffering of seeing his son suffer and die. If God made us in his image in many ways, which I assume, then he likely was weeping streams of tears, rolling down his cheeks and flooding heaven and earth. Still letting it happen for Jesus to suffer. It was the nature of things that evil causes pain excruciatingly. God accepted it, and cried his heart out.

But we may wonder, why did God tolerate our tragedy? Here we go out into further understanding of God's love, which we can never fully understand, but we just see glimpses of it in a hundred ways. His love is so tolerant that he allows people to flourish for a long time before justices rules. But that hardly explains why his children suffer innocently in traffic accidents. We also see the fact that in his creative natures that he has endowed man with ingenuity, so that man can create things that are bigger than himself and that can recoil back on him, destroying him because he can not guarantee his own safety using what he has created. Would we wish we did not have this creative capacity to create what potentially can harm us? We could find many such examples of destructive capacities of our creativity.

I do not presume to have the full understanding of what I am searching for. I am just pushing out in my mind not so much of why we are not saved from tragedies, as how tragedies happen and how God feels with us when they do. I do not know whether my own mind wondering would satisfy me if I was looking at this from within the situation rather than from without. Perhaps I am still searching for answers which I somewhat  depreciated when I began this writing.  One thing I believe with my whole heart. God knows and feels with us. He is just that close. That may give us courage and strength to go on in our new life after tragedy strikes.

                        From the Heart and Mind of Noah

                                             Blogs at noahhochstetler.blogspot.com

Over the past 3 years, more than 100 blogs have been posted, largely thoughts that ruminated in my mind at any given time. They are on many subjects, appearing in rather random order. I can easily imagine some reader came on one by chance and found it less than of a personal interest. So here I am posting an index with groupings on similar subjects and with dates on each one so they can be found by date, thus enabling a reader to go for the subject and particular blog of interest.

Why Write and have a Blog? 3-10-13

1. Love, What It Is To Me

To Like and To Love 5-1-13

New Love and Old Love 3-5-13

When You Really Love A Person 3-8-13

Feelings About Four Sons 5-27-13

Healing Love. The Kingdom of Heaven is Like.... 7-8-13

I Do Miss Her 10-1-13

Love Reflections 7-10-13

Little Tyreck 4-1-13

Loving with Heart and/or Mind 11-21-14

2. Biography, Who Was I?

Stories Of My Early Childhood 4-1-13

A Trip East When I Was Young 5-1-13

Me and Daudy 6-10-13

Me and Daniel 3-18-14

Me and My Mother 9-4-14

Me and Dad 8-6-13

Me and Brother Norman 7-14-13

My Youth Years 16-20 8-29-14

3. Dealing With Wealth- What Do You Do With All That Stuff?

The Christian and The World's Poor 1-16-14, also on 2-6-13

One of My Dad's Hobby Horses 8-26-14

Toward a Philosophy of Distributing This World's Goods 5-1-13

Giving to The Poor, Biblical and Cultural Reservations 5-27-13

To Family Members, A Report of Visiting Belize, 2013 3-13-13

What Is My Worst Sin? (To Hate) 7-14-13

So You Are Looking For Channels To Help The Needy 9-26-14

4. Humor- What's So Funny About That?

Shopping- Creativity Out Of Boredom 3-6-13

People Are Like Animals? 4-1-13

Some Things I Believe About a Woman But I Am Not Sure They Are True 3-27-14

Forgive Me Again, But... 7-23-13

I Am A Scrounger 1-13-14

5. From Icons of My Life, A Celebration of Seventy Years

Seventy Blessings of My Life 5-1-13

Seventy Highlights Of My Life 3-8-14

Seventy Things I Never Did and Probably Never Will

Seventy Things For Which Life Is Too Short 6-15-13

Seventy Things I Want To Do In My Remaining days 10-16-13

Seventy Things I Still Wonder About 11-4-13

Seventy Characters and Traits in our Family 11-18-14

6. Inspiration- What Urges Us To Continue?

The Cost and Rewards of Discipleship In Mission In Belize 3-5-13

We Met Angels In Mexico 5-2-13

Three Views of Culture 5-1-13

My First Glimpses of Heaven 6-10-13

What Is Heaven Like In My Mind? 3-6-13

My Dreams 8-10-13

Our Center of Life 34-28-14

Love Your Neighbor As Yourself 3-5-13

The Life of Plants 1-6-16

The Proverbs of Noah 5-27-13

The Kingdom Is Close, But... 4-1-13

David and Kingdom Life 4-29-14

God Was There 8-12-16

Let the Glory of God Fill This Room 12-18-16

It's The Christmas Season 12-18-14

7. Worship, Who and How We Worship

God, Our Loving Creator 3-5-13

The Sacredness of Nature 5-1-13

God's Appreciation For the Aesthetic 10-7-14

How Is God With Us? 8-27-13

Is Our God Too Great For Us? 2-29-14

The God of Intimacy

A Call To Care and Pray 10-26-13

A Call To Pray 12-9-14

What Is Our Devotional and Worship Emphasis? 11-4-14

What Does It Cost? 2-1-15

Our Focus on Prayer- Intercession 2-13-15

“We are Special” 5-5-15

How Does God Feel? 9-30-16

What Contrasts! 3-27-15

The Life of Plants 10-27-15

8. Getting Older- What Else Do You Expect?

Introduction To Aging Reflections

Aging Ideas, What Do They Call The Decades 10-4-13

What Is Different Being Seventy 10-4-13

Too Much Help? 4-1-13

How Bad Will It Be? 10-4-13

I Live Cautiously 10-4-13

At Our House 4-1-13

What Am I Doing? 3-6-13

9. Various Writings

Epic Similes From Belize 5-1-13

Epic Similes After Belize 4--1-13

Science and The Bible 10-15-13

Christian Stewardship as Taught in Belize 1-4-14

Our Present Relationships with Belizeans 3-`4-14

Reflections On My Leavings and Longings 9-14-14

A Drive into the Country Yesterday 5-18-15

10. Videos from YouTube
11. Don't Blink by Kenny Chesney 7-24-13

Chuck Stoner Visits Nicaragua 7-10-13

Micheal's Children Home Singing 12-13-14

Angelina Jolie Left Speechless 1-28-15

                                             Let the Glory of God Fill This Room

Last month one evening after I was in bed, I received a call from Hospice Care requesting my help. They had a need for someone to sit with a woman in a nursing home a few miles from our home. They were asking for relief for a family member, between 12 and 6am that night. Would I consent to go and sit with that woman for two hours of my choice. Never having gone to any hospice need at that hour, somewhat oddly, I consented. Anyway I often awake sometime in that time block.

About 3 A.M. I woke up, dressed and prepared to go shortly before 4, the hour scheduled. I took the shortest route suggested on Yahoo, although it was thru off-roads I have never traveled. When I arrived there, the nurse led me to the room where an elderly woman was in bed. She was not at all conversant; I don't even know if she knew I was there as I introduced myself. She was lying on her back, breathing laboriously with each breath as with considerable effort.

What could I do for her? I did not even know her, never having met any family of hers either. I could sit there, or what? So I stood there and prayed for her. I had to follow my “instincts” in knowing how to pray. Would it even make any difference how I prayed? So I prayed that God would be gracious to her and prepare her heart to meet him, forgiving her for anything that might still be lingering her departure. What else I prayed for, I am not clear on by now. It seemed like a holy moment with somehow God present there in this meeting of mystery with this unknown woman. I concluded my prayer with an unlikely conclusion for me: Let the glory of God fill this room!

I sat down, perhaps for the first time since I had come there. I glanced down and read a short page of a magazine I had with me. I had been in the room with the woman about 25 minutes. When I looked up, I saw the woman was totally calm, quiet, deathly quiet. I waited and she did not move again. She was gone. I found her nurse who came and affirmed that she was gone and there was nothing more for me to do or remain there.

When I checked the obituary later, I learned she was a member of a church close to our home. And that she had worked at Faith Mission in town as a “cashier” as staff. Why I was called there to preside over her home-going, only God really knows. It seems I was to prepare her for her transition to her next life. God led me to pray for her release, I believed, what ever was still needed. Why I was needed for that, again only God knows. It was a holy experience, at 4:00 A.M.

                                             God's Appreciation of the Aesthetic

I suppose I first thought of this subject when we lived in Belize and realized that there were so many beautiful flowers out there in the hills and mountains that nobody would ever see. It seemed God made this beautiful hidden beauty simply for himself to enjoy. It didn't matter that no one else was aware of the flowers. I was so impressed with this beauty that I began to video some of these flowers and greatly magnified them on the screen.

There are many other amazing matters reflecting an interest that God had in his creation that has little
relevance to mankind or the rest of creation. Take color, for instance. There are very few practical values of hues- well perhaps for bees to find sources of sweets, but are not many animals color blind? Color is for beauty, which people enjoy just like God who created it for himself and us.

Or take tastes. Why should anything be sweet, or salty, or sour, or like any taste? People would eat out of hunger even if there were no tastes. Like color, taste has very little practical value except to give pleasantness to eating beyond the need to eat and feel better. Taste makes eating pleasant as a bonus to eating. There are various things we eat for the pleasure of eating, not for their necessary or value to our bodies. We eat butter on bread for taste, not nutrition. Likewise as suggested, sugar has no essential function to the body that can't be met just as well other ways. The whole soft drink business flourishes not for its practical value to the body- but for the pleasure of drinking pleasant tastes. Foods are flavored for aesthetic reasons, not for practicality and nutrition, usually. There are aesthetic bonuses to eating beyond necessity.

Or why should sex be pleasurable? The procreative act could simply be a matter of choice and practicality like eating when we want to have children,. But there is a bonus of ecstasy far beyond the “Task” of creating a new life. You might imagine the sheer joy God had in creating man in his image, a joy of creating human life "in his image". This elation he passed on to mankind, as we create new life generation after generation.

You can also consider the sheer exultation of flinging out the planets and galaxies and the most distant stars as celestial bodies so vast and distant that the earth would have been no more than a mud puddle in comparison. At the other extreme in size, the hobby of creating the smallest units of matter, far sub atomic where electrons gleefully dance around protons with the speed of light. That is still intriguing scientists to discover. Stuff could simply have been made simple stuff. God didn't stop at just doing it the easy way. No, he tinkered with sub-matter, and no doubt enjoyed doing it with greater enthusiasm then any inventor of things in the modern world. We take pride and joy in our creations, trivial as they may be in comparison to the complexity of matter. Whether they are material like a computer or “i-machines”, or intellectual as in writings, or artistic as in paintings or architecture. It seems we have the compulsive joy of creating just like our Creator, how be it in a miniature pattern, perhaps a bit like a child playing in the sand on a beach by an ocean.

What is our greatest aesthetic investment? What is God's greatest project? Did he just set everything up for the fun of making it and admiring it; just standing back watching his universal machine work? I can't believe God would then only stand at a distance in amusement, when there is so much to communicate with his most intelligent creature- which we assume we are! And does he only try to communicate with us? How about all higher mammals who have some intelligence? But the even insects seem to have some intelligence- bees can communicate to each other and dogs howl, and endlessly other creatures are able to communicate. Why would not God want to have a relationship with all creation? I don't know what molecules would say to each other or to him. Who knows?

Several days ago I was watching over our grandson, Baby Noah, now 8 months old. He crawled through the grass, back to me, over me, stabilizing himself by holding on to me. He toyed with everything his hands touched and then went on to other matters. It seems he was trying to learn all about his world and his place in it. He didn't use any words to communicate with me. Yet we did communicate to each other. How I wished he could talk to me! He seemed to know me, that I cared about him, that he was safe with me. So I believe God's greatest aesthetic interest is in continuing with his creation, ever waiting for all creation to respond to him. He tries again and again in all ways imaginable, to tell us that he is there for us. He longs for us to communicate with him on the level of our maturity. Sometime Baby Noah will speak to me. He know me- somewhat. But it is his development that is in process. He was created to relate. He will in his time. We suppose much of material is inanimate. Maybe not. God's greatest goal is that all creation would recognize him and respond. At least we know that we who call our selves mankind can respond. That, I believe is God's greatest aesthetic goal and appreciation.

                                                 I DO MISS HER

It is so different when she is gone. There is no one to talk to around here unless a neighbor comes around. What thoughts I have must be kept to myself. Or what joys I have I can’t share. Like glancing out the front door window and I see a rabbit hunched up in the wet grass and he just sits there for period of time. I must wait until she returns, or like when a neighbor brings me pizza and offers to bring soft drink as well. I have to eat it alone. It is different being alone.

I like reading and listening to old music and videos. But when I find an amazing video of the newborn grandson, just 12 hours old; and the beaming mother who is so full of love, joy, and total peace so soon after child birth, I must wait until she come home to share it. When I want to share it with this mother after twenty some years, she also is not there. I must retreat to the lonely house and go about my business.

My first real bout with alone-ness was the first morning after a very restless night being awake a lot with muscular aches and pains like flu or malaria. I am alone to bare my misery. When I get up, I feel just the same with tiredness as well and feel like retreating to the bed where I had no comfort before. How I wish I had someone with whom to share my misery and get some comfort! It is not too bad to sleep alone, while I am sleeping- but to wake up alone when I am miserable, that is something else. I struggled through the day and was releaved by the afternoon. But I was still alone. I called her on the phone and got a little pity, but it was nothing like her presence when I was miserable.

Then there are the little inconveniences, like deciding what to cook and then to eat it alone. The dishes still just sit there this third morning. With that cut on my thumb, I would have a good excuse to have her do them if she was here. Actually I wouldn’t even have to have any excuse- she would just do them. But can I wait to have them done till she returns? What a welcome that would be to her! And a confession of my ineptness of living alone. I also then think of what it would be like if I was always alone. I think of persons I know well who have been alone for years. I just can’t imagine being happy that way. Would I get used to it? I doubt it. True, “it is not good for the man to be alone”.

Loretta in Ohio for several days, August, 2009

Rebloged as she is at a Women's Retreat, October, 2016

                                       How Does God Feel About Our Response?

This morning as I was waking up beside my wife, I rolled over to her and lay close to her, enjoying the warmth and softness of her body. She did not move. Whether or not she was conscious of my nearness, I don't know. But it set me off thinking about another love that people may or not respond to- God's love.

In so many ways and times, God wants to be close to us and desires our response as well as that of the whole world of people, whether persons are conscious or not of that fact. Some people are partly conscious of God's love and may have been as my wife. They may choose to respond or not respond and “snooze on” in their indifference. I wonder how God feels about that indifference.  No doubt he comes to many if not most people many times, and receives only partial response of returned love, or worse, even no response even though his love should have easily been sensed.

The irony is that God loves people so much and would do many things, almost every conceivable thing, for people to know that he loves them. No doubt he comes again and again and in many ways, hoping that somehow persons would turn around and embrace him. It seems if persons knew how much He loved them they would love him in the most intimate way possible, trying to return the love they feel from him. But it seems most people respond only partly and rationalize that they really do love him, while going on in their own way most of the time.

All this make me wonder how God feels about this half-hearted response of persons, or even less by people who are oblivious to his nearness and with whom he desire a reciprocal response. He being of infinite love, probably never gives up as long as people have consciousness and are able to respond in this life. Again and again and in many ways he reveals his nearness, providing for us in all our needs, giving us a beautiful environment in nature, and living in us by his Spirit as much we will allow him  to. But it bothers me that people can be so oblivious to his attempt to be near and experience his deep fellowship. What joy he could share with us if we only responded to him fully! What more do we want of him? Is our lonely life better without his closeness? How can we be satisfied by ourselves and be not responding when he does come as close as he can be, and in so many ways?  

                                                            God Was There

Even after so many years of being a believer, I still wonder sometimes why God seems to be doing so little about devastating world conditions. We talk about this in our morning devotions and pray. But I don't often feel his actions in my own personal life. Well this morning something happened I will never forget.

We were working at a rental unit and I was attempting to move a very heavy door down the stairs. It could have weighed close to a hundred pounds, quite a load for an old man. I had it balanced at a landing several steps from the top and was trying to get it in position where I could slide it down the stairs on the edge of the door. As I was trying to get it into position, it suddenly turned on me and came down on me and I went sliding down the stairs,  on my back, head first, with the door at least partly bearing on me. When we, the door and I, came to rest on the the living room floor, I crawled out and stood on my feet with only a slight soreness on my thigh, apparently from bumping down about 8-9 steps. My wrist may also have struck something but with no lingering pain.

My response immediately was “thank you God” that I survived. A minute later another thank you as I realize even more what could have happened, and a third thank you as the truth began to grip me, that if I survived what could have been fractures in legs, hips, even back or neck. Not even a bump on the head as I came down those stairs up side down, totally out of my control. (I might even have been unable to write this from a hospital bed!)

Could I  now doubt God presence and shielding that was I practically unhurt in such a dangerous accident? At home I rehearsed the whole event and shed a few more tears at the goodness of the protection of the hand of God. I hope I will never forget for  moment that God is our protection in daily life. Even daily driving the speed limit can put us within 2-3 seconds of total disaster. Yes, God is our protection always, whether we feel it or not.