I Lived. Caleb Died.

I sat reading a news story today that left me struggling to find the words. It was the story of a 15-year-old boy named Caleb Remmy. A boy who walked to a convenience store and never came home.

According to the news report from KTXS, Caleb had experienced bullying and threats. The teenager accused of killing him was just 16 years old. Caleb’s mother says surveillance footage showed the accused teenager’s mother driving him to the store and driving him away afterward.

Caleb’s mother, a nurse, rushed to the scene after receiving a call that her son had been shot. She tried to save him. She recognized what was happening to him. She held her son as he took his final breath.

I cannot imagine what that mother experienced. I cannot imagine what it is like to possess the medical knowledge to understand that your child is dying and yet be unable to save him.

But there was something else about this story that made it deeply personal for me.

I know something about being bullied.

During parts of my childhood, I experienced extreme bullying. There are things that happened to me that I rarely speak about. Horrible things. Things that left physical injuries and emotional wounds that have remained with me for decades.

One particular memory came rushing back as I read Caleb’s story.

I had been playing in the park behind my house. I was a child, doing what children do, and I was making my way home.

As I walked, I saw my neighbor and his mother coming toward me.

The boy attacked me.

His mother watched.

She didn’t intervene. She didn’t pull her son away. She didn’t tell him to stop. Instead, she threatened me not to fight back as her son continued beating me.

I sustained some serious injuries that day.

Think about that for a moment. A child is being beaten, and an adult is standing there, using her authority not to protect the child being attacked but to ensure that her own child can continue the attack.

I remember what it was like to be that child.

And today, reading about Caleb, I found myself thinking about that little boy walking home from the park all those years ago.

That little boy was me.

But there is one terrible difference between Caleb and me.

I lived. Caleb died.

I got to grow up. I got to experience life. I became a father. I got to watch my children grow up. I have lived decades beyond that horrible day.

Caleb will never have those decades.

He will never get to look back on what happened to him as a terrible childhood memory. He will never get to tell the story of how he survived.

His mother will never get to see the man he might have become.

And as I sit here thinking about all of this, I find myself confronted with questions that many Christians would probably prefer I not ask.

But I am going to ask them anyway.

Because reality does not disappear simply because it makes our theology uncomfortable.

Christianity teaches that God is omnipresent. He is everywhere. There is no place where God is absent.

Christianity teaches that God is omniscient. He knows all things. Nothing takes him by surprise.

Christianity teaches that God is omnipotent. He possesses unlimited power. He is not helpless in the face of human violence.

If those things are true, then God was there when I was being beaten.

He knew what was going to happen before I ever left that park. He was present as the boy attacked me. He was present as that mother threatened me not to defend myself. He possessed the power to stop what was happening.

But the beating continued.

And God was there when Caleb was shot.

He knew what was going to happen before Caleb ever walked out the door. He was present when the gun was fired. He was present as Caleb’s mother rushed to the scene. He was present as she tried to save her son. He was present as she held him and watched him die.

He possessed the power to prevent it.

But Caleb died.

Now, before someone rushes to offer me the standard theological explanations, I want you to consider something.

How many times have you heard Christians testify that God helped them find a parking space?

How many times have you heard someone say that their car wouldn’t start, they prayed, and suddenly it started?

How many pastors have stood behind a pulpit and told their congregations that God gave them the sermon they were about to preach?

We hear stories about God arranging travel plans, opening doors, closing doors, bringing people together, helping someone find a lost object, providing a convenient parking space, or making sure someone arrived at just the right moment.

Christians speak as though God is constantly intervening in the smallest details of their lives.

And then a 15-year-old boy is shot and killed.

I am struggling to understand how we can speak so confidently about the former and so comfortably retreat into mystery when confronted with the latter.

If God can make your car start, could he not have prevented another car from starting?

If God can arrange for you to arrive somewhere at precisely the right moment, could he not have delayed Caleb’s arrival at that convenience store?

If God can place a thought in a pastor’s mind on Saturday night, could he not have brought about some circumstance that would have prevented a child from being murdered?

We are not necessarily talking about God parting the Red Sea or sending fire from heaven.

A dead battery.

A flat tire.

A delay of five minutes.

The kind of ordinary circumstances Christians attribute to divine intervention every single day.

And please don’t immediately tell me that God cannot intervene because he must respect human free will.

The Bible itself presents God intervening in human affairs. In Genesis 11, God intervenes to restrain what human beings are doing at Babel. He confuses their language and disrupts their plans.

Human beings continue to possess the ability to make choices, but their ability to carry out a particular plan is restrained.

And even apart from that biblical example, preventing the consequences of someone’s decision is not necessarily the same thing as eliminating their ability to make that decision.

A person can decide to commit murder and be prevented from carrying it out.

So the question remains.

Why do Christians speak as though God intervenes to help them find a parking space, yet a child can be murdered without the intervention that would have saved his life?

I am not claiming to know why God did not prevent Caleb’s death.

That is precisely the point.

I don’t know.

And neither do you.

But I am increasingly troubled by Christians who claim to know exactly what God is doing when something good happens to them, only to insist that God’s ways are mysterious and beyond our understanding when something horrific happens to someone else.

When the outcome is favorable, we apparently possess remarkable insight into the mind and activity of God.

When the outcome is devastating, we suddenly remember that his ways are higher than our ways.

Perhaps we should consider whether we ever possessed the knowledge we claimed to have in the first place.

There is a difference between thanking God for something good and claiming that we know God specifically intervened to produce that particular outcome.

There is a difference between being grateful that your car started and declaring that the Creator of the universe supernaturally intervened to make it start.

There is a difference between being grateful that you survived something horrible and claiming that God intervened to protect you because he had a special purpose for your life.

That last one is especially difficult for me today.

Someone could look at my life and say, “God protected you that day in the park because he had a plan for you. He knew you would grow up, become a father, become a pastor, and spend years teaching the Bible.”

It sounds wonderful.

It sounds comforting.

It sounds like the kind of testimony that would bring tears to people’s eyes in a church service.

But today, I cannot hear those words without thinking about Caleb.

What about him?

Did God not have a plan for his life?

Was there nothing he might have accomplished? No one he might have helped? No family he might have had? No future worth protecting?

What am I supposed to say to his mother?

That God had a purpose for the little boy walking home from the park all those years ago, but not enough of a purpose for her little boy walking to a convenience store?

I cannot say that.

I will not say that.

I am grateful that I lived. I am grateful for the years I have had. But I refuse to turn my survival into a testimony that implies my life was more worthy of divine protection than Caleb’s.

And I refuse to use the fact that I survived to construct a comforting explanation of what God was doing when I was being beaten.

I was a child who was being hurt.

I needed someone to stop it.

No one did.

Caleb needed someone to stop what was happening to him.

No one did.

These are realities. They are not theological illustrations to be neatly resolved before the conclusion of a sermon. They are not opportunities to demonstrate how well we have mastered a particular system of theology.

They are the experiences of actual human beings.

And perhaps one of the great failures of contemporary Christianity is our inability to allow the reality of human suffering to challenge the things we so confidently say about God.

We seem to think that faith requires us to have an explanation for everything.

But the Bible itself contains the cries of people who could not understand why God was not intervening.

“How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever?” (Psalm 13:1).

“Why standest thou afar off, O LORD? why hidest thou thyself in times of trouble?” (Psalm 10:1).

“O LORD, how long shall I cry, and thou wilt not hear! even cry out unto thee of violence, and thou wilt not save!” (Habakkuk 1:2).

Those are not the words of people who have abandoned the Bible.

Those words are in the Bible.

And at the center of the Christian faith stands a crucified Savior who cried out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46).

Christianity is not a religion that should require us to pretend suffering is less terrible than it is. It is not a faith that should require us to deny the darkness of human experience.

The cross itself confronts us with suffering, injustice, violence, death, and the terrible experience of abandonment.

The Christian hope is not that we will always be able to explain why God permits suffering. Our hope rests in Christ, in his death and resurrection, and in the promise that death will not have the final word.

But that promise does not require me to pretend I understand why Caleb died.

It does not require me to pretend I understand why I lived.

And it certainly does not require me to listen to someone explain how God miraculously provided them with a parking space without asking some very difficult questions about the implications of that claim.

I am writing this today as someone who believes in God.

I am writing this as someone who believes the Bible.

I am writing this as someone who has spent much of his life studying and teaching theology.

But I am also writing this as that little boy who was beaten while a mother stood watching.

And today, that little boy, now a grown man, is thinking about another little boy who never got the opportunity to become a grown man.

His name was Caleb.

He was 15 years old.

He had a mother who loved him. He had a life that should have continued far beyond a trip to a convenience store.

I wish he could have grown up.

I wish that someday, decades from now, he could have sat down and written about the horrible things he experienced as a child.

I wish he could have told the story of how he survived.

I wish he could have experienced all those ordinary moments of life that we so easily take for granted.

But he won’t.

I lived.

Caleb died.

And somewhere, a Christian is thanking God for a parking space.

I think we need to talk about that.