Fall seven times. Stand up eight.

Halee Gray Scott, PhD

Live Well. Love Well. Lead Well

Review: Rejoicing in Lament: Wrestling with Incurable Cancer & Life in Christ

by Filed Under: Bodies, Courage, Faith, Hope, Live well

9k=The news came broken. Car crash. Overturned convertible. Care flight to Denver. ER. ICU. Broken neck. My friend Kari’s life had been forever altered during a casual drive in the country. In all likelihood, she’d never use her arms or legs again. What does one say in times of such tragedy? Baffled visitors drifted in and out of her hospital room. Some assured her of God’s miraculous healing; others mentioned dreams they’d had of her walking. Some prayed while others wept.

I remained silent. What words would suffice? I was angry—angry that God would allow so much life to be taken from my friend. And yet I knew God’s promises of abundant life. Without words to articulate this tension, I stumbled in the fog, suspended between my anger, my great sorrow, and my knowledge and faith in God’s promises.

This very tension between lament and God’s promises is the subject of J. Todd Billings poignant new book, Rejoicing in Lament: Wrestling with Incurable Cancer and Life in Christ. In September of 2012, Todd, a Reformed theologian at Western Theological Seminary in Holland Michigan, was diagnosed with incurable cancer at the age of 39. With the revelation came the questions, quick and acute: Why me? How long? Does God owe me a long life? What about my young children? Billings had spent the bulk of his years devoted to the study of God and the difficult questions of the Christian faith. Now, he returns to these questions, not with the detached observation of a systematic theologian, but with the urgency of a man confronted with his own mortality and deeply acquainted with sorrow.

In Rejoicing in Lament, Billings explores the tension between “a genuine lament and a genuine rejoicing in God’s promises—promises that, as expressed in the Psalms, are the basis for praise, trust, and also complaint and lament; promises that find their fulfillment in Jesus Christ, and life … while abundant, cannot be measured by a lifespan” (p. 6). Throughout the book, Billings intertwines his cancer story “with a much weightier story—the story of God’s saving action in and through Jesus Christ” (p. ix), showing us how to genuinely lament before God all the while rejoicing in His promises.

Billings, a gifted thinker and writer, is an able guide through difficult terrain. In ten chapters, he points the way through the “fog of uncertainty” that settles around us when calamity strikes; he tackles the “problem of evil” and why bad things happen to good people. (Spoiler alert: Christians don’t have the answer.) Billings argues that because of Christ, we can follow the script of the Psalms, especially the Psalms of lament, and “openly admit our confusion, anger, and grief without worrying that it will be the last word about who we are” (p. 43).

I wish I’d had Rejoicing in Lament with me in Kari’s hospital room to help me navigate through my sorrow and my faith in God’s Word. It would have better equipped me both to grieve and to help my friend. Whatever adversity you may be struggling with—an illness like Todd or a season of loss—you will find great comfort and clarity within it.

Remember Your Fairy Tales

by Filed Under: Adversity, Hope

Last Friday, NBC premiered the second of two primetime dramas that drawn firmly grounded in fairy tale lore, but Disney never told us about these fairy tales.  ABC’s Once Upon a Time centers on a group of fairy tale characters cursed by a spiteful, evil queen to live where there are no happy endings–Storybrooke, Maine.  The characters, including Snow White, Prince Charming, the seven dwarfs, Jiminy Cricket, and others, have no recollection of their real identities and their single hope of returning to fairy-tale land is Emma Swan, the rough and tumble daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming.

While ABC’s Once deeply delves into characters we thought we knew, NBC’s Grimm is a “grim” crime procedural drama with a fairy tale overlay.  Homicide detective Nick Burnhardt sees things he can’t explain, then discovers that he is a descendant of the “Grimm’s”, an elite group of hunters who chase the monsters fictionalized by German brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in the 19th century.

Different as they are, neither show resembles the shiny, saccharine Disney films that minimize both suffering and the full gravity of evil.  In fact, it could be said that in this way, these modern shows are closer to the ancient stories than the tamer tales we are familiar with.  Regardless, art is a mirror of culture, reflecting the guiding assumptions and worldview of a society, and I believe that Hollywood’s recent focus on the fairy tale says something important about the prevailing mindset of Americans.

For centuries, the fairy tale has served as a beacon of hope for dark times.  During the Great Depression, many people did not have the money to pay for enough food in their household, but when Disney originally released Snow White and the Seven Dwarves in 1938, people resonated so much with the film that it made four times more money than any other film released in 1938, garnering $3.5 million in the U.S. and Canada.  In a world demoralized by the horrors of World War II, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien wrote The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings, respectively.

The appeal of fairy tales is not that they minimize suffering, but that they show a way through the darkest of times. “Fairy Tales are more than true,” wrote English journalist G.K. Chesterton, “not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”

In producing two fairy-tale-themed shows in a single season, Hollywood is tapping in to an ancient recipe to soothe today’s anxieties about the world economy and civil unrest.  “There is something comforting about these stories,” said Once producer Edward Kitsis when asked about a recent slew of fairy tale-based Hollywood product, such as Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots and others. In these “difficult times,” fairy tales “give people hope,” he added.  And as the character Snow White says in the premiere of Once, “believing even in the possibility of a happy ending is a very powerful thing.”

 

Photo credits: ABC