The Problem with 30,000 Feet: Thoughts on Las Vegas, Evil, and Why God Tarries

Posted on by Erin Bartels

As I flew back to Michigan after attending my third Women’s Fiction Writers Association Writers’ Retreat, I felt tired and satisfied, happy to be coming home yet still sad to leave.

Most of all, I felt a profound sense of love for the world that sped by 30,000 feet below. Almost everything I saw was lovely in its own way.

Neat lines of houses I knew were inhabited by people with hopes and dreams, fears and disappointments and triumphs.

Crooked lines of canyons carved out of the rock by rivers.

Fingers of mountain ranges stretching out across the ground.

The world from 30,000 feet is easy to love.

On the ground? Not so much.

I’m not talking about the natural world in this case, but the world in the way the Apostle Paul talked about it — the world’s system, the flesh, humankind’s sin nature, our tendency to corrupt and twist nearly everything we touch in some way.

Events like the shooting in Las Vegas Sunday night — 58 dead and 515 hospitalized with injuries is the last count as I write this — force us once more to grapple with this reality. Why are some people so utterly horrible? Why are we bent on destruction? Why this waste of human life and potential?

And no answer we come up with truly satisfies. It’s guns. It’s mental illness. It’s religious ideologies. It’s Fate. It’s dumb luck.

As much as we would all like to avoid the question of why great evil continues to be done “in 2017” or any other year, we cannot. Bad people do bad things. Storms level entire islands. People take advantage of one another. Evil simply is. 

I would like to live with my view of the world at 30,000 feet. But I’m not afforded that luxury. I live here on the ground. And so do you.

While I was at the retreat, a friend and I chatted on the patio after the sun went down. We talked about our work, but also about the state of the world. It seems it’s hard to avoid talking about it — it’s on everyone’s mind. She said something to the effect of, “I suppose your faith helps you with all that.”

It does. To an extent.

When it comes to politics, I vote my conscience and trust God to work things out according to His will. That frees me from a lot of hand-wringing, anxiety attacks, and ulcers I think a lot of my friends are dealing with on an almost daily basis.

When it comes to terrorism and massacres, it still helps, but it’s harder. I can intellectually accept that each of us is sinful and in need of redemption. But it seems like some people are SO sinful, so utterly consumed by irrational hatred. I feel sick to my stomach with the magnitude and mindlessness of it. There’s no revenge here or personal vendetta. Those, while still horrible, are at least comprehensible at some level. But randomly shooting strangers? Driving trucks and vans into crowds of strangers? Blowing up strangers? It’s incomprehensible. I hardly know what to do with it.

My one comfort in these cases is still my faith. That God is just. That evil will be punished. That my own sins are forgiven through true repentance. That He still has and is working out His perfect plan. That these events grieve Him — but they do not surprise Him.

And when I am tempted to accuse Him of allowing terrible things to happen as His judgment tarries, I must remember that it is because of mercy that He waits. That just like the door on my airplane, once the doors to salvation are shut they will not be reopened. His seeming slowness in setting things right is is not an oversight, nor is it an indication of neglect or of sadism. It is patience and compassion.

“As I live, declares the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live.” – Ezekiel 33:11a

and

“The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” – 2 Peter 3:9

I must rest in the knowledge that God sees the world from 30,000 feet and He sees it at ground level and He sees into the hearts and thoughts of every single human being that has ever lived, is now living, or will ever live in the future. And while I may sometimes have a hard time keeping a handle on the plot of a 400-page novel that I am writing, He never misses even a syllable of the story He has been writing from the Beginning. He is a far better author than I, and I can trust Him with every character, every plot twist, every dark moment, every triumph in His story.

And I can certainly trust Him to end each chapter exactly when it should end.

How Far We Haven’t Come

Posted on by Erin Bartels

Remember how I was so pleased in my last post to be able to work on something new? Well my brain swiftly switched gears back to something old. Something incomplete. Something festering.

Back on December 10, 2013, I wrote a blog post entitled Adventures in Shameful American History that discussed a number of cultural and historical realities I was struggling with as I completed research for a novel I was writing called The Bone Garden. It was before the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner and Freddie Gray, before the unrest in Ferguson and the riots in Baltimore, before the massacre in Charleston.

In January and February of 2014, I wrote the first draft of a novel that turned out to be frighteningly timely. It traces the race relations within several generations of one white family, from auspicious beginnings as participants in the Underground Railroad, to a mixed bag of love and hate during the Civil Rights era, to a new reconciliation in the modern time. For the next year, I worked hard on that novel, revising it multiple times, editing it to a high gloss. But there was always a problem with the modern-day timeline. I fixed some of it, but it still never felt quite right to me. It wasn’t as good as it could be. Compared to the other two timelines, it seemed…too easy.

The day after the shooting in Charleston, I attended a prayer vigil at Union Missionary Baptist Church in Lansing, Michigan. The crowd was relatively small in number but great in spirit. There were mostly African American worshipers, but a fair number of white worshipers as well. The Spirit was moving and pain was released and anger was expressed and sorrow was felt. It was deeply emotional and raw.

Growing up in a white small town in the Lutheran church, I had never been part of a service quite like that before. I’m a Baptist since I married a Baptist pastor, but it’s not a “shoutin’ church,” if you know what I mean. It’s not a charismatic congregation. It’s pretty tame. But I have been privileged to join together with other churches in the city every year, usually during Holy Week, to worship together. Stiff white Methodists and shouting black Baptists and proper Presbyterians and calm Congregationalists, all worshiping together. These have been some of my most memorable times in the house of God.

Even so, this prayer vigil was qualitatively different. It was a lament.

I drove away from that service with a heart that was still heavy. Yes, I believed God would give comfort to the bereaved. But it still happened. There was still a terrible racist person who murdered nine people, including some in their seventies and eighties, for no reason other than his idiotic, misguided, backward, reprehensible beliefs. Beliefs that were taught. And are taught. All over the place. Still.

And I realized what bothered me about the modern-day storyline of The Bone Garden. It wasn’t true. Fiction — good fiction — tells the truth. And I wasn’t doing that. I wanted my modern day white characters to be better than their fictional predecessors. But they aren’t. Yes, some are more understanding and more accepting and more loving. But others are not. They cannot be. Because Dylann Roof exists. Thousands of Dylann Roofs exist, and more of them are being trained up every day. And I do a disservice to the truth to ignore that when writing this story.

So I’m back at it, working hard to make things real. No matter how difficult it is for us to stomach. We look back at our parents’ generation and think that we are better than them. We would never support segregation or turn the other way when peaceful marchers were set upon by dogs and attacked with fire hoses. We would never have let 100 years pass between the Emancipation Proclamation and Selma.

But is that the truth? Obviously not. That Confederate flag flying high in South Carolina? It’s not down yet.