Fides Quaerens Intellectum

C.S. Lewis once wrote “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

An encounter I had recently while staying in Pennsylvania reminded me how true this really is. I had been doing dissertation research in PA earlier this month, as well as a bit of recruitment for IMPACT 360 (www.impact360.net), and on this particular day had scheduled a lunch meeting with a headmaster of a Christian school in the area who sent us one of their graduates this academic year. We enjoyed sharing our life stories, dreams and plans for the future–mostly in terms of our careers. It became clear to me very quickly that he is a respected visionary leader in his school, church and home. When the topic of conversation turned to family towards the end of the meal, he said to me “Well, my wife and I are actually going through a pretty tough time right now.” He went on to explain the good news of his wife being pregnant with their third child, and how they had already been blessed with two strong and healthy boys. “Even though she hasn’t been born yet, we’re naming our little girl Victoria Grace,” he explained. “We want people to know her name before she’s born.”

“Why’s that?” I queried.

“Well, you see, several months ago our daughter was diagnosed with anencephalitis…..”

Although he kept talking, I didn’t hear much after he used that medical jargon, which is one of the few medical terms I actually know–only from doing case studies in medical ethics during my time in graduate school as well as my own experience in teaching bioethics to seminarians and undergraduates. For a second I was frozen in a state of utter shock. Anencephalitis is a brain condition in a small percentage of in-utero babies, and it is 100% fatal once the child no longer has the benefit of being inside the mother as a life-support system. I knew immediately where he was going with this.

“The doctor tells us that Victoria Grace will live for a few hours at most as soon as the baby is born, perhaps as little as a few minutes.” he went on to say, mournfully. “My wife is due any day now.”

“Dear God,” I prayed, “why?”

My new friend kept talking. “You know,” he explained “I won’t tell you that my wife and I don’t have our bad days when we tell God we don’t understand. And we do plead with Him for the life of this child we already love so much. But we know that His grace is sufficient for us, and we thank him for the time we will have with her and have already had as she has grown inside her mother. We just wouldn’t be able to make any sense of this if we didn’t have Christ, knowing that this is all somehow for His glory and our good” (Rom 8:28). “I can’t wait to see her in Heaven,” he concluded. He beamed with a kind of intense joy and inner peace that I’d rarely seen in a Christ-follower before.

This man, three years my junior, in many ways is so much mature than I am. I have no idea what it would be like to experience the joy of finding out that I’m going to be a father again, only to discover soon thereafter that the kiss I would give to my daughter welcoming her into the world would also be a kiss goodbye. And yet, I see through my new friend’s testimony and faith in God’s plan that with Him all things are possible (Mt. 19:26), even finding new joy through the struggle of such searing pain.