Living in the grey

Today I had the incredible privilege of meeting a miracle baby. Simon Peter, now eighteen months old, was born at 25 weeks (around three months premature) weighing 2lbs, to my cousin and his wife. Having a baby three months early must be a terrifying experience, whatever your circumstances but at the time Ben and Anna were living on a remote island in the South Pacific with only a small hospital and no specialist neo-natal care faciliaties. The first few hours of Simon's life were spent being airlifted to Australia and the next few weeks in intensive care.

Against all the odds, Simon is now a healthy toddler - walking, attempting to talk, engaged and engaging. This afternoon I sat on the floor with him and pushed a truck around and enjoyed the simple satisfaction that comes from making a small child laugh.

But this morning on the news I heard that Amanda Holden had lost her baby, stillborn at seven months. You don't have to be a mum to understand just a little of the pain and devastation that a loss like that would induce.

Why should one couple experience the miracle survival of a baby born three months early in the middle of nowhere while another suffers the devastating loss of a child surrounded by some of the best medical care in the world?

My experience of growing in relationship with a God of love, compassion and grace is starting to teach me that there are no simple answers to a question like that, and yet there seems to be something hard-wired into our humanity that desperately longs for a formula, a certainty with which to counter this kind of earth-shattering loss. Maybe this means, as uncomfortable as it might be, that we have more in common with Job's friends than we'd like to admit.

The problem, of course, is that to reduce suffering to a black-and-white issue of cause-and-effect - that a righteous life leads to blessing and an unrighteous one to punishment, or any other pat response that Christians have a painful tendency to trot out at inopportune moments - actually does both us and God the disservice of reducing him to a remote, disinterested entity who commands our obedience rather than desiring relationship.

I'm not interested in living in relationship with a God who can be reduced to something I can fully understand - what on earth would be the point of that? But if I'm willing to allow God to exist outside of the limits of my comprehension, I also have to be willing to embrace the grey, and to keep asking "Why?" without any real expectation of ever fully understanding the answer.

As Job says, "Who are we to tell God how to run his affairs? He's dealing with matters that are way over our heads."