Such Things Ought Not To Be!

Remember the 17-year-old girl I requested prayer for on Wednesday?

A few minutes ago her relative who requested prayer e-mailed me this photo of the tumor doctors removed from her abdomen:

The young lady, Sandra, is doing as well as can be expected under the circumstances.

The removal of this tumor revealed another large one wedged in behind her kidneys. These malignancies have metastasized into her lymph nodes also.

I have never even met Sandra but her condition outrages me.

When I see a thing like this tumor, my immediate reaction is This Is Wrong!

Why do I feel that way?

Because I have some idea of what is right.

We all have this sense of what is right and what is wrong.

Where does that come from?

It comes from knowing that there is some kind of order to the universe and that some things fit into that order and others do not.

If we did not recognize an order to the creation, then we would not recognize when something is out of order; we’d just consider that tumor, (or oil spill or war, or rape, or murder or betrayal or molestation or cheating) as the way things normally are.

But we do know that it is wrong for a lovely 17-year-old girl to have such a malignancy growing in her. We do know that certain things are just plain wrong.

If we did not know that something is catastrophically wrong, then we would never try to make it right.

We’d let sick people suffer. We’d let starving people starve. We’d let terrorists terrorize… but we don’t let such things go on without opposing them.

We recognize that there is a pattern to creation; that that pattern is good; and that something has screwed it up big time.

So we try to the best of our ability to set things right again.

Today I’d started to write about proof and the existence or non-existence of God but receiving that photograph set me off on a different tract … or maybe it didn’t.

Could it be that we feel certain things are wrong because they are wrong? We see a pattern in creation; that means a Creator has a hand in it.

I’ve had sophomores ask me, “Can you prove that God exists”.

“No, I can’t,” I say. “Can you prove that He does not exist”?

Inevitably, they launch into a litany about war, deformed babies, retarded children — things which have virtually nothing to do with God but which prove that evil exists.

That’s no surprise to anyone.

We know that evil exists because something within us tells us that the pattern has been broken, that things were not meant to be this way, that there is an anomaly, a twist, a perversion — we know that something is wrong when we reasonably expect it to be right.

Why in the world would we expect anything to be right unless we harbored some idea that God not only exists but that He is good?

I’m pissed about that tumor right now and I don’t know if I’m making any sense writing in the heat of the moment like this.

I’ll worry the idea of proof around again some more tomorrow. — God willing, of course.

Oh, about the other lady we prayed for Wednesday: I called and she won’t get her test results till next week. She said they did remove some polyps from her esophagus and they are doing a biopsy on places from her colon … Er, which makes me wonder just how long the probe those doctors used was?