On the night of April 1st, 1999, 10 year old Dren Caka was taken captive along with others from his hometown of Gjakova in Kosovo. Everyone was forced to sit on the living room floor of a neighbor’s home and wait the few short moments before members of the Serb police force opened fire. Dren was shot but pretended to be dead as the gunmen set fire to the home.

His baby sister was still alive but Dren couldn’t get her out. He’s the only one who managed to escape. Her screaming still rings in his ears as he wanders zombie-like through the rest of his life.

How can God sit still for this?

If He doesn’t want to do anything about such a horror, He could at least give us an explanation. The best the Bible offers is the idea that God does whatever He wants, in addition to the scads of episodes in the Old Testament where He actually causes suffering – sometimes akin to the story above.

One of the most difficult things about this kind of suffering is that it seems to be pointless, and suffering that doesn’t have a point is patently unjust. Stories of despots, dictators, terrorists and other “bad guys” getting theirs don’t bother us. But children? The poor? Widows and orphans?

Innocent suffering is wrong. Evil. Many in our culture won’t tolerate the idea of a God who not only gives license to pointless suffering, but seems many times to be the cause of it.

It’s the pointlessness of suffering, not the mere existence of it, that garners so many indictments against God, and the most prolific apologetic against His existence. If we were to terminate a pregnancy because the child would be born with a life threatening deformity, or if we amputated someone’s leg to rid the whole body of gangrene, we’d have some supporters. Likewise, if there was some kind of meaning that we could attach to global suffering – some redemption or restoration on a not-so-distant horizon – we might be a bit more comfortable with it all.

But we can’t see past the pain, and we’re given no explanation from God. In the silence we’re left with four difficult options: either there isn’t a point, or God doesn’t exist, or He’s punishing us, or the point is beyond our ability to understand.

A great many people embrace the first three.

In our culture however, the last option – the idea that there are things outside of our ken – is an anathema.

A Ken Problem

When I was 6 years old, while on vacation with my family to the Gulf coast, Mom took my cousins and I to Six Gun Deer Ranch, a western-themed amusement park crawling with cowboys, the smell of gunpowder, and creepy “abandoned” ghost town buildings. I was particularly drawn to a small herd of life-sized fiberglass horses.

While Mom wasn’t looking, I mounted the tallest composite filly of the bunch and was immediately thrown onto an equally fiberglassed imitation tree stump, breaking my forearm in two places. Another casualty of the Old West, I lay on the ground staring at my twisted limb. It didn’t hurt much, on par with a headache.

The paramedics arrived with a fascinating temporary inflatable cast and rushed us to the hospital. If this was all there was to having a broken arm, no problem.

Everything changed when the doctor came on the scene. He and his assistant laid me on a gurney then looked at mom like something bad was about to happen, then started yanking on my arm.

Anesthesia? Whiskey? The legbone of a steer to bite? Nothing but pain. I felt the bones grinding together as my broken forearm was pulled and twisted – muscles and sinews stretching in ways they’re not supposed to – then snap, scream, done.

The ordeal was excruciating but I was old enough to understand the reason for the pain. I knew that there was something on the other side, that this was a smaller part of a larger thing.

I trusted mom – she didn’t seem to have any issues with the procedure (until I started screaming). I trusted the doctors – they knew what they were doing.

I knew that they were looking out for me.

When the bones were set and the cast in place things got a ton easier. Mom drove me to grandma’s house where I was treated like a king, eating all sorts of treats and showered with gifts and attention that I never would have gotten otherwise.

Mom snuck off and bought me that pair of shark jaws that I had seen in one of the souvenir shops on the coast, and delivered a short speech about my bravery as she presented them (I could’ve done without the speech). My cousins were all jealous. Not a bad deal. The pain was assimilated into the whole experience and quickly forgotten.

It would have been altogether different if I was unable to understand.

To illustrate, imagine a desert island where myself, my three year old daughter, and my 48 year old brother have been stranded. We’ve got shelter, water, food, and a cheap multi-tool. Daughter and brother both have a toothache that has developed into a potentially life threatening abscess.

After some deliberation, brother and I decide that the teeth will need to be pulled. He understands and volunteers to go first. When I’m done, we shove a dirty sock in his mouth, laugh a little, and feel closer because we suffered together.

Then we move in on daughter. She has no idea what’s coming, so she quietly submits as we ask her to lie down and open her mouth. Brother holds her, I go to work, and everyone suffers.

Daughter would feel the same pain as brother, but her experience would be much different. In addition to the physical pain, she would also suffer the pain of feeling betrayed, like I’m an enemy, as well as the trauma that comes when everything’s gone out of control.

Prior to all of this, her relationship with me would be one of trust, fun, safety, protection, intimacy, and friendship. But there’s no way we can explain why it’s necessary for her to experience so much pain.

She doesn’t have the ken – the ability to understand.

She’ll do what most humans do when they experience pain that seems to be pointless – she’ll cry “evil.” She’ll either brand me the enemy, taking years to get back to the place where she can trust me again, or she’ll blame herself, like there’s something she did wrong to deserve such a horrible experience.

Either way, there’s evil here.

When our suffering comes at someone else’s hand and it’s a) clear that they’re working in our best interest, and b) we can see past the pain, we’ll hug them when they’re done and call them friend. Nobody would call a doctor “evil” or question her motives. We know what doctors do and why they do it.

But when we can’t understand the purpose behind the pain, foul play is the only explanation that seems to make sense. “The doctor is bad and wants to hurt me,” and/or worse, “There must be something I’ve done to deserve this.”

I have two friends who recently divorced. Soon after their separation, a deep sense of shame entered into their kids. They began to act up in school, fight, and completely lose their minds. Mom and dad were left scratching their heads thinking “I just can’t figure out why they’re so angry.”

If these kids could somehow realize that their parents are human, dealing with their own demons, the experience would be different.

But for now, they’ve blamed themselves.

The suffering of this world, especially the extreme cases, many times doesn’t make sense. God could stop it all but He’s unresponsive – not filling us in on why things must be as they are. So, not unlike a 3-year-old being held down by a friend, or kids trying to figure out why their world has disintegrated, we try to make sense of the pain that is such an integral part of our world.

But we don’t understand as God does, we don’t have His ken.

So we cry “evil.”

Or chalk the whole God thing up to nonsense.

Indecent Proposal

Core to the problem of suffering is the expanse between what God understands and what humanity is capable of understanding. It’s not that God doesn’t want to explain every single thing to us, it’s that we don’t have the ability to understand.

Like our children look at us when we try to impart the wisdom of a clean room or a visit to the dentist, we look at God as we consider His world, and it doesn’t always add up.

It can’t.

Maybe that’s one reason why the Bible calls Him “Father” and us “His children.” It’s not just a picture of love and protection, but a proclamation that puts everyone in the right place. He knows more than we do. Way more, so much more that it would be impossible for us to understand His world like He does, no matter how hard He might try to explain Himself.

But on the island of toothaches, we don’t see ourselves as the child who can’t understand, we see ourselves as the adult, fully capable of grasping all realities.

Look at us, at what we’ve been able to figure out – our discoveries, inventions, equations, theories – all truly miraculous. As a result, we posture ourselves as though we’ve managed an adult-level mastery of our universe, inciting us to further believe that there is nothing that we can’t grasp.

The idea that we’ve got so much more to figure out, that our level of knowledge is ameobic compared to God’s, that we’re the 3-year-olds on the island, is beyond offensive.

But if there is a God – some almighty entity capable of creating the cosmos, among a million other things, there’s no way that His every deed will add up to the way I think the universe should run. By definition, because of the limits of my mind, some of His shenanigans will seem down-right unjust.

While we can and should continue to attempt reconcile our scientific observations with our spiritual ones, it will be impossible to reconcile them all. Science can never be more than human observation. Sure, we can elevate our perspective with technology, but it will always be a human perspective.

It will always seem like, on some level, that the very idea of God is nonsense.

As far as Dren Caka is concerned, and all the other horrible things that go down in this world, I can’t help but be angry with God. As I hold the truth of suffering and the limits of my ken in tension, I’m left feeling like the cosmos isn’t fair, that there must be a million other ways that God could work out His plan. I’m not personally comforted by the idea that having God’s perspective would clear everything up.

But I’m also uncomfortable with the idea that every single thing about God’s world should make sense, and that I’m the one who gets to decide what’s nonsense and what’s not.