From “Telling Stories in the Dark: Finding healing and hope in sharing our sadness, grief, trauma, and pain” by Jeffrey Munroe
I asked Mitch what sense he made of his and Sandie’s stories, what sense he made of his second cancer following so quickly on the heels of his first, and of Sandie’s cancer coming about the same time as his second diagnosis. I asked if he ever asked himself why he lived and she died.
“It’s puzzling,” Mitch said. “There aren’t answers. I have experienced suffering firsthand and live with the hope and trust that on some future day all things will be okay, but I don’t know any answers. All we lived with the last year and a half of Sandie’s life was cancer, first mine and then both of ours. I’d been teaching theology for almost two decades before all this happened, and my classes studied theodicy and all the wrong things there are to believe about why bad things happen to good people – or any people. I never asked,’Why me?’ You trust God but know all kinds of things happen along the way.
“I have often thought that if it was the case that if you had faith and prayed in the right way you’d get better, then everybody in the world would be Christian. But we serve a God who was the suffering, self-sacrificial servant. All of my study prepared me to know that those who follow God are not spared anything. God never promises to take away suffering. It’s our witness and presence in the midst of suffering that shows our character, and I had lots of chances to think about what sort of person I wanted to be.”