Everything Is As It Must Be

Breaking news: everything is bad, it’s just as terrible as you imagined and probably worse.

Or so it might seem.

The beginning of my year has been exceptionally disappointing. I had a health scare that I’ll touch on later, but the truth is all my friends feel trapped between melancholy and outright woe. Inflation, unemployment, a failing economy, world wars, corruption and disinformation have made our lives much less bearable and leave little emotional room to deal with problems that still come up in our own lives.

But in the middle of my despair last month, I took on a new slogan: “Everything is as it must be.”

That probably sounds a little like spiritual oatmeal, the kind of thing an unqualified motivational speaker shouts into the void of a Zoom call. It might sound like resignation. It might sound like I’m wanting to bypass the hard work of justice and repair. I don’t see it as fatalism despite soaking in the despair all around us. I see it as a release that allows me to trust in Christ. It is an invitation to a deeper and more demanding faith that can paradoxically hold onto hope in the face of so much sorrow.

But if it’s all as it must be, why couldn’t God make it better? I believe God is the Ground of All Being, not a cosmic puppeteer. When we say that Christ is alpha and omega, we are naming the loving reality that upholds all of existence. That includes life, but also death. That includes joy, but also pain, That includes beauty, but also cruelty. God is the context in which it all happens.

By saying, “everything is as it must be,” I’m getting at a deeper acceptance of the totality of our circumstance. This moment and the conditions that created it are exactly in front of us. I would never have imagined life in America to ever be this bad in our post-modern age. But I’m also done fighting against reality and instead just want to lean into what is.

Most world religions promote this principle. I feel uniquely able to embrace it because of my radical belief in the resurrected Jesus Christ. I know we are all connected through Christ. I know this Christ saves. And by, “saves,” I don’t mean grants certain people a ticket to Heaven, I mean Christ solves the problem of sin. And by, “sin,” I don’t mean doing evil things even though evil is on bold display right now, I mean we are separated from God. Christ is the bridge back. All our natural and spiritual laws point to this interconnected life in Christ. It’s a pattern I trust, even though I lately must intentionally remind myself that I do indeed trust the unfolding of God’s will.

I have to let go. Part of my bad year was having a heart attack on Valentines Day. Other than a couple of close calls on the interstate, an incredible laboratory error that caused a frightening misdiagnosis about a decade ago, and that one time I jumped off a shelf while skiing and sunk into a tree hole, I’ve never felt I was close to dying. I’m not prepared to even digest what this all means to me at this point, and perhaps I’ll write about it more lucidly in the future, but it was a rare time where I contemplated that I might not be here the next day.

Here’s the thing for those readers who have never met me in person. I’m in good shape. I work out. I eat very healthfully. My cholesterol is fine. I’ve never smoked. I don’t drink alcohol. My cardiologist said there is nothing in my bloodwork that would have even suggested to them that I had a problem. That is the hardest thing for me to come to grips with, that I cannot control this. In fact, I cannot control nearly anything in my life. Trying to control it leads me to suffer more because the way my mind works is to get stuck on cycles of rumination on fantasies of control in my life.

So I’m releasing the burden of needing to control anything, of needing things to be different. For any Marvel fans, a joke I’ve told frequently this decade is that I’m waiting for the Avengers to go back to before 2016 and put the Infinity Stones back in place. This can’t possibly be the sacred timeline, right? I hate to break it to you, but it in fact is.

This present moment, right now, this is what is true. I can’t waste time wishing things were different. I can’t waste time being mad at God for a heart attack that in the end, did not kill me. In fact, my own cardiovascular risk is now lower than almost anyone else. Similarly, maybe I can trust that there is more afoot in the rest of Universe.

At this point I feel compelled to make a very faithful pivot. None of this means we should be passive or inactive in the face of injustice. God has not chosen good or evil. God is not the author of our suffering. God’s love gave us freedom, freedom made us messy and this messiness led to greed, ignorance and systemic power abuses all around. We shouldn’t ask, “why did God allow this to happen?” God only wants a universe based on love and freedom so there may have been no other way. Christians instead need to ask, “how do I minimize the suffering of sin?”

Christians are lucky in this regard, because Jesus gave us the starting place.

Matthew 25:34-36

Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world, for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ 

This is prophetic vision we can model today. We can live in witness to a way of life that is about the Kingdom of God right now, not an artificial boundary line drawn on maps and held together with walls and guns. We can simplify our consumption, welcome immigrants, restore justice, promote economic justice, bear one another’s burdens. You know, Jesus stuff.

The challenge that, “everything is as it must be,” is really about living into the kingdom right now. That is the call of Christ, not to simply imagine a future after death where everything is perfect, but to live like it’s already here. If we truly believe that Christ is the alpha and omega, then not even the worst evils can undo this promise of renewal.

Let the phrase, “everything is as it must be,” remind you that Christ is at the center of reality. We are not here to question that reality, but to respond as Christ. We’re not here to explain suffering, we’re here to lessen it. We’re not here to excuse worldly power structures, we’re here to live out the priorities of our real kingdom: justice, mercy and humble service.