Just Desserts

Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.

Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband

As a little girl in church, I used to sing the beautiful hymn, "Fairest Lord Jesus." I loved the melody, and even though I didn't really grasp the words, I liked them too.

Fairest Lord Jesus, ruler of all nature,
O Thou of God and man the Son,
Thee will I cherish, Thee will I honor,
Thou, my soul's glory, joy, and crown.

I had no idea what "my soul's glory, joy, and crown" were, and I didn't much care. All I cared about was that Jesus was the "fairest"! And since Jesus and I were tight, I expected things should work out pretty well for me. Fairness was really important to me, as it is to most children. I didn't want my brothers to get more candy than I did or to stay up later than I got to. I just wanted everything to always be fair. So it was reassuring to think of Jesus as he was described in that hymn—the "fairest."

I clearly didn't understand that the hymn writer was using another definition of fair—beautiful, lovely, and pleasing. Bummer! But shouldn't Jesus still be described as the fairest anyway? After all, he is God, and God is fair, right? Yet, bad things happen to people all the time. And bad things happen to Christians too—people who are tight with God. So is God fair?

In the summer of 2010, Joni Eareckson Tada, a woman I have long admired, was diagnosed with breast cancer. More than thirty years ago, her book about the diving accident that left her a quadriplegic was one of the last books I read before I was diagnosed with the degenerative eye disease that took the majority of my vision. Her story inspired me, and reading about how she struggled, questioned, and triumphed over her limitations was exactly what I needed tucked into my heart for my coming journey into darkness. I have loved her ever since, so I was saddened when I heard about her cancer. I thought, "She doesn't deserve that pain. She's been in a wheelchair since she was seventeen. Isn't that suffering enough? She has served God so faithfully, even with her disability. It just doesn't seem fair that God would let her get cancer. Isn't one hard thing in this life enough?"

We tend to feel like a little suffering is expected, but once we've met the Christian quota for suffering, it just isn't fair to have more piled on. Besides, don't we as Christians deserve protection, blessings, and healing from "fairest Lord Jesus"? And not just us—there are plenty of people who may not be Christians, but they don't deserve a bum rap either. You know, like how a dad loses his job at the same time his elderly mom has to be put in a nursing home, while his young son struggles with a new diagnosis of diabetes and his wife is so overwhelmed that she falls into a deep depression. And of course, with no job, there is no insurance. How is that fair? How can "good" people deserve such bad things in life? Especially when we believe God is good?

Many of us embrace the belief that we deserve good things from God because he is good and that seems only fair. But is it really true? Yes, God is good, but does this mean we deserve only good things in our lives?

What Do We Deserve from God?

I've never grappled with this issue of what we deserve from God as much as I did when I sat in the front of the auditorium in a civic center on a cold January night. I was the guest speaker at a women's conference. I had just completed the first of three talks, and it had already been a hard weekend. The travel had been challenging; the weather was raw and wintry; and now a striking theological difference between me and the conference organizers had sparked an undercurrent of tension in the room.

The tension had to do with our differing views of healing. One group of Christians reads the Bible and is convinced it is God's will that everyone be healed. Other Christians read the same Bible and conclude it is not God's will that everyone be healed. If you're unfamiliar with the Bible, this may be confusing. Here's a very simplified synopsis of the two basic ways Christians understand sickness and healing.

• View 1: Some believe all sickness should be healed. When healing does not occur, they believe it can be attributed to either a lack of repentance for sin or a lack of faith. If you have enough faith, God will heal you. Because of your faith and God's goodness, you deserve healing.

• View 2: Others believe God allows sickness and suffering, and both can be redeemed by God for a purpose. But it is not God's will that all should be healed on planet Earth. Sickness isn't necessarily a result of individual sin or a lack of faith, but rather a result of our broken human condition. Suffering and healing are not based on merit. In general terms, we aren't sick because we deserve it, and we aren't healed because we deserve it.

I happen to fall into the View 2 camp. But the majority of the women in the auditorium on that January weekend fell into the View 1 camp. It was clear that someone on the "choose the speaker" committee had failed to inform the leadership that I might have a slightly different perspective on what the Bible says about healing. Oops! I guess I just assumed that any group that invited a blind speaker to their event would know they were getting the walking poster child for the "God doesn't always heal" perspective.

My feeling that the woman in charge didn't agree with my understanding of Scripture was confirmed as the weekend went on. Following my first talk, in which I shared my story of living with blindness and living with faith, the woman responsible for putting on the conference stood on the platform and graciously offered a subtle theological rebuttal. I felt a...