Family Talk

Dr. James Dobson: Welcome everyone to Family Talk. It’s a ministry of the James Dobson Family Institute, supported by listeners just like you. I’m Dr. James Dobson, and I’m thrilled that you’ve joined us.

Roger Marsh: Welcome to Family Talk, the broadcast ministry of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. I'm Roger Marsh. At some point, every one of us has faced a moment that simply didn't make sense. Maybe it was a loss so great or a prayer that went seemingly unanswered. Perhaps a life cut short in ways that defy explanation.

In those moments, our faith can feel like it's standing on shifting ground. On today's edition of Family Talk, Dr. James Dobson begins a deeply personal conversation about those times when God appears not to make sense to us, drawing from his bestselling book on that subject. Through real-life stories that are heartbreaking and profound, Dr. Dobson explores what he calls the betrayal barrier and why understanding it may be the most important preparation a Christian can make. Here now is Dr. Dobson with a few words to frame what you're about to hear.

Dr. James Dobson: We’re going to talk today about the troubling times that come into the lives of most of us. I would say all of us at one time or another, and they defy explanation. We’re going to discuss this topic for several days. I hope you’ll stay with it.

I wrote a book on this topic some years ago and I called it "When God Doesn't Make Sense," because the topic is so relevant to all of us. The theme of the book is trying to understand those experiences when we cannot figure out what God is doing and why things don’t go according to plan. It happens to all of us sooner or later, and it raises theological questions that even the theologians have difficulty dealing with. That’s what I want to talk to you about today.

Our setting for today was a staff meeting where we brought together these members of the staff. I would guess there were 150 people there, and I spoke candidly with them about this subject, when God doesn't make sense. With that, we're going to let you hear what I had to say that day, and I would love to hear your thoughts when you've heard this three-day presentation.

It would be really interesting this morning to take a microphone and go around this room and ask you of your own experiences with horror. Many have had children who have been sick, or have been through divorce, or have had physical illnesses that threatened your life. It’s part of the human experience. And it is part of the Christian experience.

I think it is extremely important to not only admit that to ourselves and to each other but to try to understand it, hopefully before it occurs. I've spent 25 years or more counseling with people and talking to people in trouble, people who are in a state of panic. What I have discovered is that Christians especially at a time like that, not only go through the crisis that creates the turmoil in the first place, but also an unanticipated theological crisis that is actually more painful than the disease or the loss or the sickness or whatever it is.

When those things occur, we know they're going to happen. Everybody knows you're not going to get out of this life alive. We understand that. It’s appointed unto man once to die. Everybody understands that. We're not going to live forever. And yet when it happens to us, as it has happened to maybe five or six billion people from the foundations of the earth, since Adam and Eve, when it happens to us, we say, "Why me?" as though we've been singled out by God for this discomfort, as though he has selected us for some kind of unique, terrible difficulty that is not part of the human experience.

Actually, what occurs in a moment like that is people come to that terrible crisis where God doesn't make sense, where they can't make the pieces fit, where you just don't know what God's doing. Again, from my counseling experience, it is not the sickness, the death, the loss, the pain, the divorce, the cancer, the tornado, the flood. It’s not the particular source of difficulty that causes the most stress in life. It is confusion over what's going on.

You’ve got soldiers in a war, and they attack a machine gun nest and know they're going to die. They do it, and they do it willingly because the cause for which they're risking their life makes sense to them. Throw their body on a hand grenade; that's not uncommon in combat, guys giving their lives. Jim Elliot, the missionary, was speared, he and four other missionaries, to death. He said, and I believe this is a quote, "He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose."

He willingly put his life on the line. Why? Because it made sense to him. The problem is when you go through these things and you can't figure out what's going on. Where is God? Why would he do this to me? Why did he allow this to happen? That’s where the crisis really occurs, and that’s where the greatest stress comes from.

We had a young man at our church in Pasadena, my home church, named Chuck Fry. He was a high school student, extremely bright, very disciplined, very dedicated. He graduated near the top of his class, went on to college, and again graduated with honors. He was just a wonderful young man, the pride of the church.

Chuck Fry wanted to be a physician. That was his great desire. At the time, I was a professor at USC School of Medicine, and I knew how difficult it would be for him to get into medical school. At USC that year, we had 106 open positions and we had 6,000 applicants. The competition was fierce. Chuck Fry competed and was granted admission to the University of Arizona Medical School. Great medical school. I’m sure that he and his family prayed about that, about this calling on his life to be a physician.

Toward the end of that year, he began to think about what he would do after he graduated from medical school. Chuck had his priorities in order. He just wanted to serve the Lord. He did not want anything to do with high-tech medicine or big city power and money and all that that can mean in some medical settings, less today than 15 years ago. He wanted to get away from all that and he wanted to be a medical missionary.

He wanted to go to Africa and wanted to give his life to the down-and-outers who could not pay him, who could not reward him in return, and to try to reduce the suffering in the world. That was the man's passion. That was his desire. He finished that first year, did well, made good grades. In the summer between his first and second year of medical school, he began having some fatigue. He didn't feel good. He went to see his own physician and was diagnosed with leukemia. Chuck Fry was dead by November.

You can think about that for the rest of your life, but you're not going to figure that out. You can search the scriptures from one end to the other and you will not understand why the Lord didn't let that dedicated young man go to Africa to ease the pain of all those children and all those people who have no access to medical care and to give his talents to them and to minister.

Mainly, he wanted to do it in the name of Christ. He wanted to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ. How do you explain that? Why didn't God allow him to do it? Where was God when he felt the call to go to medical school? Where was God when he prayed that he would gain entrance into the medical school? Why did the Lord invest so much talent in a young man who was not going to be able to use it, while winos and dropouts and people who don't contribute anything to society or to the Kingdom sometimes live 80 or 90 years?

How do you explain those things? You can't explain those things. There are some things you cannot explain. Let me tell you the rest of the story. Chuck Fry had met a young lady named Karen Ernst, who was also in our church. They fell in love and they were planning to get married. When the diagnosis of leukemia came about, Karen loved him so much that she married him anyway, knowing that she was going to lose him.

When he died, Karen took his place in medical school for the purpose of going to Africa. She completed her medical training and just recently returned from a five-year stint as a medical missionary in Swaziland. Why did the Lord not let him go with her? You don't know. There are times when God appears not to make sense. My book probably should have been written that way. It probably should have said "Hold on to your faith when God appears not to make sense." God always makes sense, but he doesn't always make sense to us.

Some of you know Dr. and Mrs. Jerry White. Dr. White is the president of Navigators. A year before we came to Colorado Springs, his son Steve was here in town. Steve White had been off to college and came home and he was anxious to get into broadcasting. While he was waiting, he was driving a taxicab to support himself and his family.

One night a deranged person in this town, a man for reasons that may never be known for sure, decided to kill somebody. Anybody. There is some suspicion that he did this out of anger at God and wanted to get back at him and was willing to kill somebody just to wound God, if God loves people. And so he dialed a number for a taxicab. Whoever came, he was going to kill. It was Steve White. He came and the man shot him in the back of the head and killed him.

This is a godly family. The Whites have given their lives to the Lord, heading up one of the most effective ministries in the United States. That's not supposed to happen to those kind of people. It was random. It could have been any one of the taxi drivers in this town, but it happened like that.

Having been on a faculty of a children's hospital for a long time, I'm very vulnerable to children who suffer. Even while I was there, I had difficulty going into the oncology ward and going into the places where children were dying because I was just too vulnerable. I just love kids and it was just really hard for me to deal with that. Some of those kids that were there will be on my mind forever.

We received a letter from a father about his little girl. This is what he wrote. He said, "My dear Bristol, before you were born, I prayed for you. An interesting place to begin considering what came. In my heart, I knew you would be a little angel, and so you were. When you were born on my birthday, April 7, it was evident that you were a special gift from the Lord. But how profound a gift you turned out to be. More than the beautiful bundle of gurgles and rosy cheeks, more than the firstborn of my flesh, a joy unspeakable. You showed me God's love more than anything else in all creation."

"Bristol, you taught me how to love. I certainly loved you when you were cuddly and cute, when you rolled over and sat up and jabbered your first words. I loved you when the searing pain of realization took hold that something was wrong, that maybe you were not developing as quickly as your peers. And then when we understood it was more serious than that, I loved you when we went from hospital to clinic to doctor, looking for a medical diagnosis that would bring us some hope."

"And of course we always prayed for you, and prayed and prayed. I loved you when one of the tests resulted in too much spinal fluid being drawn from your body and you screamed. I loved you when you moaned and cried, when your mom and I and your sisters would drive for hours late at night to help you fall asleep. I loved you with tears in my eyes when, confused, you would bite your fingers or your lip by accident, and when your eyes crossed and then went blind."

"I most certainly loved you when you could no longer speak. But how profoundly I missed your voice. I loved you when your scoliosis started wrenching your body like a pretzel, and we put a tube in your stomach so you could eat because you were choking on your food, which we fed you one spoonful at a time for up to two hours per meal. I managed to love you when your contorted limbs would not allow ease of changing messy diapers. So many diapers, 10 years of diapers."

"Bristol, I even loved you when you could not say the one thing in life that I longed to hear back: 'Daddy, I love you.' Bristol, I loved you when I was close to God and when he seemed far away, when I was full of faith and also when I was angry at him. And the reason I loved you, my Bristol, in spite of these difficulties, is that God put this love in my heart. This is the wondrous nature of God's love, that he loves us even when we're blind or deaf or twisted in body or in spirit. God loves us even when we can't tell him back that we love him."

"My dear Bristol, now you are free. I look forward to that day according to God's promises when we will be joined together with you with the Lord, completely whole and full of joy. I'm so happy that you have your crown first. We will follow you someday in His time. Before you were born, I prayed for you. In my heart, I knew that you would be a little angel. And so you were. Love, Daddy."

My heart goes out to that father. He prayed for her before she was born. How does he explain that? As I was writing this book "When God Doesn't Make Sense," I came under the influence of Dr. RT Kendall in London, who had a great impact on me. The book is dedicated to him.

He said that in moments like we have just read about, many people encounter what he calls the betrayal barrier. You come up to a point like that, and because of a theological misunderstanding and a tragic misinterpretation of scripture, a person feels abandoned by God, rejected by him, hated by him, and misunderstood by him. At the time that you need him the most, and at the time that you're going through the greatest agony, he seems a long ways away and distant.

Dr. Kendall said that of the people he has talked to, he estimates sooner or later, sometime in life, 100% of us will hit the betrayal barrier. Only about 10% will recover from it. Those people go through the rest of their lives, and it doesn't mean they're not Christians, it doesn't mean God doesn't love them, it doesn't mean they aren't in His service, but it means there's scar tissue there and there's a wound there and there's a feeling of not understanding and a feeling of rejection.

What bothers me is that if this is true, and I fully believe it is, then we ought to tell young Christians about it. Instead, we often give them the other message. One of my favorite ministries in the world is Campus Crusade for Christ. They're doing wonderful things. So this is not a slur or any kind of derogatory statement about Campus Crusade.

But you know the little booklet that they distribute called the Four Spiritual Laws? What's the first of the four spiritual laws? God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. Now that is absolutely true because anything consistent with God's will is a wonderful plan. If it's in His will, it's going to be right.

But what does that imply? It implies you're going to understand the plan and it implies you're going to like the plan. For Joni Eareckson Tada, the plan meant sitting in a wheelchair as a quadriplegic from the teen years on. For Bristol, it meant an early death. And for Bristol's father, it meant unspeakable agony.

It is a wonderful plan. Please understand me. In talking about this, it’s very important to recognize how God feels about us. The scripture is full of statements about His love for us, His tenderness for us. He hurts when we hurt. He feels what we feel. He's there reaching out to us. He's a friend that sticks closer than a brother.

All of those things are true. But it is also true that the Lord allows us, for reasons that are partially clear but maybe not entirely clear—Paul says we see through a dark glass; we’re never going to fully understand till we get on the other side—but for reasons that we don't fully comprehend, he allows us to go through these times where we can't figure out what he's doing. It is universal in the Christian life. If it hasn't happened to you yet, it's going to. And when it does, don't panic. God is still there whether you feel anything or not. Unless you understand that, you're not prepared.

The problem is one of expectation. It's what you anticipate and what you expect. If you're led to believe God will jump through hoops when you get to a difficulty, and even if you do go through a hard time, he will explain it to you immediately and perhaps apologize for it. If you believe that, disillusionment is really not very far behind.

It’s really dangerous to not understand. Scripture is absolutely clear on this subject. I have spent more time researching "When God Doesn't Make Sense" than all the other books I've written combined. It has had a tremendous impact on me personally. I have grown, my faith has grown as a result of this study.

You’ve been listening to a lesson that I taught to the staff then, that was shortly after I wrote and published then new book called "When God Doesn't Make Sense." We are just getting started with this theme. I hope you'll be with us for this entire series because to really understand the times when the "whys" of life become urgent and they blast into our Christian experience, we have to prepare ourselves for them because they are part of the Christian life.

You will not nail down all the answers to the "whys" that come into your life. You just will not. To force them into tidy little platitudes will paint yourself in a corner. For example, when a child dies, some people will try to explain that away by saying that God wanted that little boy or girl in His garden. That’s nonsense. That’s foolish. The Lord doesn't deprive a mother or father of a precious child for His selfish purposes. You're trying to force an explanation that doesn't fit.

So why do some children die? The answer to that question is we don't know. We have to live with unanswered questions. What the Lord says to us in moments like these is, "Trust me."

Roger Marsh: Trusting God without an explanation is one of the most difficult things we can do. But today here on Family Talk, Dr. James Dobson made the case that it's not only possible, it's what we are made for. You've been listening to part one of Dr. Dobson's presentation on what happens when God doesn't appear to make sense to us.

If you'd like to hear today's program again or to share it with someone walking through a difficult season in life right now, go to JDFI.net. If today's program resonated with you, I want to tell you about a free resource that goes even deeper. The Dr. James Dobson Family Institute has developed a 10-day email series based on Dr. Dobson's bestselling book, "When God Doesn't Make Sense." It's designed to walk you through seasons of hardship and help you examine its purpose.

These messages can strengthen your faith and show you how the darkest valleys can lead to life's greatest blessing, and that, of course, is a closer walk with the Lord. To sign up for the free 10-day email series, "When God Doesn't Make Sense," simply go to JDFI.net and search for that title.

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I'm Roger Marsh, and on behalf of all of us here at Family Talk and the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, thanks so much for listening today. Be sure to join us again next time for part two of this very important presentation by Dr. James Dobson himself, centering on the theme of when God doesn't appear to make sense to us. That's coming up here on the next edition of Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk, the voice you trust for the family you love.

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