But It's Not Fair!

Disappointment with God by Philip Yancey is one of my two favorite books. I could read it over and over and over again. And I think the entire book is worth quoting. But this is the part I've been reading lately. It's about fairness. Fairness is very important to me. And I often hear myself saying, "But that's just not fair". For years I cried out to God, "God, you're not being fair. This isn't fair!". These excerpts have meant a lot to me through the years.

I challenge you to go home and read again the story of Jesus. Was life ‘fair’ to him? For me, the cross demolished for all time the basic assumption that life will be fair!


Jesus offered no immunity, no way out of the unfairness, but rather a way through it to the other side.


God will sometimes seem unfair from the perspective of a person trapped in time. Only at the end of time, after we have attained God’s level of viewing, after every evil has been punished or forgiven, every illness healed, and the entire universe restored, only then will fairness reign.

At All Costs

To be commanded to love God at all costs, let alone in the wilderness, is like being commanded to be well when we are sick, to sing for joy when we are dying of thirst, to run when our legs are broken. But this is the first and great commandment nonetheless. Even in the wilderness – especially in the wilderness – you shall love Him.

- Frederick Buechner from Secrets from the Dark: A Life in Sermons.

In 1997 driving across the Jimmie Davis Bridge on my way to work, I was struck by this.  Not just struck.  I was moved, I was touched.  I was overwhelmed with the understanding of how and why I could have pure joy and love for my heavenly Father when my mother was 12 hours away dying a painful death.  I can't explain it.  I can't put words to it.  But this chapter in Buechner's book comes so close.

It was there, in that wilderness, that for the first time in my life I caught sight of something of what it must be like to love God truly.  It was only a glimpse, but it was like stumbling on fresh water in the desert, like remembering something so huge and extraordinary that my memory had been unable to contain it."  "I did not love God, God knows, because I was some sort of saint or hero.  I did not love Him because I suddenly saw the light (there was almost no light at all) or because I hoped by loving him to persuade him to heal the young woman I loved.  I LOVED HIM BECAUSE I COULDN'T HELP MYSELF.  I loved him because the one who commands us to love is the one who also empowers us to love, as there in the wilderness of that dark and terrible time I was, through no doing of my own, empowered to love him at least a little, at least enough to survive.  And in the midst of it, these small things happened that were as big as heaven and earth because through them a hope beyond hopelessness happened.

There are a few moments in time that I remember so vividly...the sounds, the sights, the smell, the feeling.  This moment on that bridge is one of those for me.

(You should read this whole book or at least all of Chapter 14.)