In the summer of 2021, my husband and I joined our oldest daughter and her family for a vacation in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. During a day trip to Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, we hiked down to Miner's Beach, baby Riley in a backpack and three-year-old Emmett skipping ahead of us along the path.
When we got to the beach, Emmett went straight for the water. While he was throwing stones into the surf, a wave surged up, slapping him in the chest and legs. The look on his face was priceless.
Pure outrage.
Even in August, Lake Superior is cold.
How Emmett felt when that wave hit him is how I sometimes feel about events in the world. I ask God: Why did you let this bad thing happen? Why is there so much suffering? Why do evil people get away with murder and good people die young?
Outrage.
I'm not alone in feeling this way. If you read the Psalms, you see that many of these ancient prayers express a complaint directly to God. "How long, O Lord?" they ask. "Don't you see what is happening to us?" Psalm 17 makes a case to God as if the speaker is addressing a court of law. "Hear a just cause, O Lord; attend to my cry."
Biblical scholars call this kind of psalm a "lament." The Book of Psalms contains more than fifty psalms of lament, some spoken by individuals, some by a congregation. Lament psalms usually contain five elements: 1. Complaint 2. Plea 3. Confession of trust 4. Request for help 5. Praise.
The 19th century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins seems to have channeled some of these psalms in what literary critics call his "terrible sonnets." In one sonnet Hopkins complained, "Comforter, where is your comforting?" In another, he wrote, "Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend / With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just. / Why do sinners' ways prosper? And why must / Disappointment all I endeavor end?"
Pastor Katie Hays, who started a church for spiritual refugees in 2013, expressed the mood of the lament psalms in a less traditional way. When she reflected on the lives of her parishioners, most of whom had experienced abuse, and when she assessed the emotional toll that church planting had taken on her and her family, Hays said we need a new prayer. Recalling the trilogy coined by writer Anne Lamott -- Help, Thanks, Wow – Hays said the fourth basic prayer is What the f* *k?
Hays confessed that WTF was the prayer she prayed most often.
"I believe this to be a biblical prayer," Hays said. "Many of the Psalms can be summed up thusly, as a confused and angry servant of God wonders angrily when the promised relief will come."
WTF is an expression of outrage – and bewilderment.
Sometimes we voice prayers of lament when we watch a video that shows a flood of muddy water destroying a whole town. Sometimes we voice a psalm of lament when we hear about an eleven-year-old child killed at a funeral by an exploding walkie-talkie. Sometimes we add our voices to a chorus of lament at the state of political leadership in our country and around the world.
Sometimes we don't even know we have been praying psalms of lament. Our faces don't show it. But in our hearts, we have held a long bitterness born of anger and disappointment at other people and at God. This shouldn't have happened. God shouldn't have let it happen.
When suffering or injustice occurs, "This shouldn't have happened" is a profoundly ethical response. We say it precisely because God has shown us how the world ought to be. When harm is taking place, when a bully is picking on a smaller kid, for example, or when someone is taking more than their fair share, we expect authority figures such as parents, teachers, police officers or judges to step in and stop it.
So, we expect God to do the same thing on our behalf.
God does love justice. The Bible is clear about that, too. "I, the Lord, love justice. I hate robbery and wrongdoing." (Isaiah 61:8) God shows particular concern for those who are poor and vulnerable. "Father of orphans and protector of widows is God," Psalm 68:5 says.
We have a right to expect intervention from God.
And yet, my own outrage may also be fueled by a faulty understanding of God's role in the world and God's relationship to human beings. God does not exist to make my life easier. And, God has given human beings free will. Though not all suffering is caused by human choices, much of it is. War, for example. Poverty. Greed.
Even last autumn's flooding in the Southeast – what insurance companies would call an "act of God" – may have elements of human causality. Many scientists believe that the intensity of tropical storms has been increased by climate change. Climatologists have been warning us for years about the effects of rampant use of fossil fuels. They tell us to expect storms of increasing frequency, longer duration, and greater violence.
We are free to do things that hurt ourselves, each other, and creation.
WTF?
God seems to love human freedom more than I do.
Yet, if we are free to do harm, we are also free to do good, to be compassionate and courageous, to challenge wrongdoing when we see it. We can choose to protect people and the earth. "Be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect," Jesus said. Jesus did not mean perfection in the sense of never making a mistake. He meant being perfectly, completely, whole-heartedly committed to what God loves.
To love justice is to love God.
Perhaps the way that God prefers to intervene in human affairs is through us.
May we accept the responsibility of this terrible freedom. May we believe in ourselves as much as God seems to believe in us.
What suffering of human beings pulls on your heart? What desecration of creation makes your blood boil? What might you do about it?
John Wesley said "Do all the good you can, by all means you can, in all ways you can, in all places you can, at all times you can, to all people you can, as long as ever you can."
Jimmy Carter, who helped build Habitat houses into his nineties, said something similar. "My faith demands that I do whatever I can, wherever I can, whenever I can, for as long as I can with whatever I have to try to make a difference."
Wow.
Dulled by holiday fatigue and winter gloom, I'm not sure I can promise all that every day as long as I live. I'm not John Wesley or Jimmy Carter. But I can imagine doing one small thing today. A note to a grieving colleague whose good friend was killed by gun violence. An email to my senator asking how if she did, indeed, vote to appropriate funds for a proposed mine that would deposit toxic waste next to Lake Superior and Porcupine Mountains State Park.
What one thing can you do today to make the world better? I believe that when we commit ourselves to doing good, God gives us the strength to do it.
May this be the way that the New Year begins: one small thing.
Start there. Start now.
Scripture: Psalm 73
Playlist: "Do Something," Matthew West, Into the Light, Sparrow Records, 2012.