I think the best way to look at this is that, while remembering Romans 8:28, and realizing that God works everything out for good, we don’t exactly know *how* He’s going to do it. For all we know, it could be through our human response.

To sum up, and make it relevant to this blog entry, the humanity of the situation should be our priority mainly because there’s almost no way we can be certain of how God’s going to use the situation for His good (there are usually much much too many factors that we don’t even know about), so we should deal with what we can *do* in the situation.

Okay, so maybe I lack in summarizing skills…

Job faced more tragedy than any of us ever will. And yet he was able to remain “God-centered.” He blessed God both for giving and for taking away. And even though he had questions and doubts, in the end he trusted God’s sovereignty. He recognized God’s hand in his tragedy.

One is that God is sovereign and can do whatever He chooses with what He’s created. And nothing He does can ever change what He’s told us about Himself. So if my wife is killed in an accident or whatever, it won’t change what God is and I hope it would not change my opinion.

Second, at my age, I’ve stood with plenty of children, or parents, at the coffin of their parent or child. That’s sure not a time for theologizing. All I can ever do is to tell them I love them and God loves them too and will walk through the valley with them as He has promised.

I think the phrase for “too God-centered” is actually “so heavenly minded as to be no earthly good”.

I’ve lost both my parents now and lost a good friend (a man) to breast cancer last year. And my sweetheart bride of 48 years is a 4-time Breast cancer survivor, so we’ve walked through some valleys. The best thing I can ever tell anyone is that God has been faithful through it all, and can be for them, too.

-30-

I don’t understand the point you’re trying to make with your last post.

Could you explain it?

And he said, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return. The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.” (Job 1:21)

Then Job answered the LORD and said: “I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. ‘Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?’ Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. ‘Hear, and I will speak; I will question you, and you make it known to me.’ I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” (Job 40:1-6)

So what SHOULD we say to people in situations like yours?
– Greg Long

That situation doesn’t come up much, but when it does I usually don’t say much. Except that “Anything I can think of saying to you is going to sound really stupid, so I’m not.”

But the question that then gets overlooked is, “What does ‘God-centred’ actually mean?”

It seems taken as read in some circles that “God-centred” means “Concerned with explanations and actions on the theological, spiritual or moral level”. But if the Reformers were right, and our earthly vocations are inherently valid activities for Christians to pursue, then this should make us reassess what “God-centred” actually means. Perhaps the truly “God-centred” response to the bridge tragedy is precisely to be concerned (whether as a citizen, politician, engineer or whatever) with mundane questions of bridge design and inspection regimes.

I tend to agree with CAndiron, above, that the problem is not “God-centeredness.” What CAndiron puts in theological terms, I’d put in psychological terms, though: I think that people who continually talk about God, particularly in times of (other people’s) pain, are *self*-centered. They are uncomfortable with the pain they are seeing, and they rush in with “God words” to make themselves feel better.

I particularly agree with Black Angus — a cousin, ya think? — when he says “People came up to me and said, ‘Well at least this will help you be a better pastor.’ My initial thought was to sucker punch them. Given a choice I’d much rather be a slightly diminished pastor with a living Mum and Dad!”

I’d have to disagree with the poster who said that the correct response to a question like “Why did my child have to die?” is “Because we’re all sinners.” Theologically, that doesn’t seem sound to me — Jesus died for us while we were yet sinners, and he died once and for all and healed us from our sins. We don’t have to keep dying to pay off the debt! And psycholocially, that’s one of the harshest things to say to a suffering paret of spouse or child. The honest response for most normal people, unless they’ve been terribly intimidated by the “Christianators,” would be, “So you’re saying my daughter was a horrible sinner who deserved to suffer and die? Well, #%$#@ you! And #%$#@ your God, too.”

The people who say idiotic words like “Well, this tragedy will make you a better person, and besides, we’re all sinners and deserve to die,” are probably just clueless, not actually mean. They are trying to make themselves feel better by locating a silver lining in the misery.

But we don’t have the right to do that. When a friend (or anyone) is suffering, that’s not the time to indulge our own uncomfortable feelings by reciting stuff that makes *us* feel better. It’s the time to just be there, and maybe water the plants and bring her or him a cup of coffee every once in awhile. It’s the time to *show* the love of Christ, not describe it.

As another poster said above, the most helpful things Job’s friends did was to sit silent with him for days, just being there. It’s when they opened their mouths to “explain” his horrible losses that they got themselves in trouble.

In other words, ‘too God-centered’ would refer to someone who desires to follow scripture, who is compassionate, but becomes misguided in practice(Todd Friel seems to occasionally fall into this, esp. 3 in his response to the bridge). We need to distinguish between cold hearted Pharisaical piety and misguided zeal.

YES! Spot on! Hypersanctimoniousness (subset of hyperspirituality): this incessant obsession with having to PROVE how more-pure-n-pious-than-thou we are by babbling Christianese all the time. (Please pass the pink stuff.) Linguistic slavery that flows over into spiritual slavery (or perhaps the other way around). How does the meme of talking and thinking that way square with “My burden is light and my yoke is easy”? (And how does it differ from bordering on a cult mentality?)