From: kmm@cs.purdue.edu (Kevin Megill)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: healing statistics
Date: 28 Aug 92 05:23:31 GMT
Organization: Department of Computer Science, Purdue University

In article <Aug.25.02.08.00.1992.18920@athos.rutgers.edu> U16028@uicvm.uic.edu writes:

>My mother just died on Friday, August 21, of complications due to cancer.
>...
>I prayed.  I prayed.  I begged and pleaded.
>
>And she died.
>
>Now all I can do is wail and gnash my teeth.
>
>Why did he abandon me?


Two years ago my father died suddenly in a plane crash.  I am
not at all certain that he was a Christian.

The evening I heard the news, I stuck some classical music
on the stereo and put headphones on (this let me feel "alone"
in the middle of our apartment), and spent an hour with the
Lord, just crying quietly and "sensing" his presence.

I asked for him to reassure me of his presence and comfort
somehow, perhaps by bringing a verse to mind.  A verse DID
come to mind almost instantly -- the one that says
"Jesus wept".  I knew this verse because I've always
heard that it is the shortest in the Bible.  But that night
I thought through its context in John 11.  Jesus was standing at the
grave of Lazarus, weeping at his death.  Why was he weeping?
He knew he would raise Lazarus from the dead in a minute.
I thought that evening (and still think) that Jesus wept
over death in general -- even though Lazarus would be raised
in a few minutes, for a few more years, he would die again,
and others were dying.  Jesus was weeping over death  
and the destruction and unhappiness it causes.   
The creator of the universe stood face to face, in his humanity,
with the terrible effects of sin, and wept over the tragedy.  
Probably Jesus, with a greater understanding of what could have 
been instead -- the way things were designed to be apart 
from the entrance of sin into the world -- felt the tragedy 
more keenly than we do.  

As I thought this I could imagine Jesus re-committing
himself to go to the cross, to do what was necesary
to conquer death, motivated by the grief he felt.

But this meant that as he stood there weeping at the
tomb of Lazarus, he was not weeping over Lazarus' death alone.
He was weeping for the grief Mary and Martha were feeling,
but not only for that.  He was somehow
weeping for everyone who ever had been hurt by sin and
death and ever would be.  And that meant he was weeping
for my dad -- and for me.  That evening it was as if
Jesus stood there with me, crying with me over my
father's death.

There are a lot of philosophical questions I could
have raised about God's sovereignity and why He allowed
what He did.  I think I understand some of the answers.
But all that really mattered at that point was that
he FELT my sorrow with me.  I needed someone to cry with
me more than anything else.

Afterwards I realized that there is a lot of Scriptural
precedent for this -- especially in verses like 
Hebrews 2:16-18, 4:14-16, etc.  Also in the way that
David cried out to God with such emotion in the Psalms.
I am not usually a very emotional person, but it
really moves me to know that Jesus is so HUMAN.

Kevin Megill
kmm@ector.cs.purdue.edu   or   megill@dsu1.dsu.NoDak.edu