Sunday Morning Med--Burning Questions

“My tears have been my food day and night, 

while men say to me all day long, "Where is your God?"

Almost fifty years ago, when my alma mater called to ask if I’d be interested in leaving Arizona and coming back to Iowa, I never really considered not going. I loved high school teaching because I loved high school kids; but I understood that if I were ever going to write, I’d have to teach in college, where there simply is more time.

When I taught there, Greenway High School was brand new, on the edge of a northern suburb of Phoenix. I’d been hired precisely because I was a Christian. I was also male, experienced, and newly outfitted with a masters degree--those were also factors. But, illegal or not, I got the job on the basis of my faith. The district interviewer, a man named Bill Sterrett, was a Christian too. That’s another story.

           

Only two years later, with a college teaching offer in my hand, I decided to leave. When I told Mr. Sterrett, I got scorched. He looked up from behind his desk and shook his head. “Why would you want to go there?” he said. “Everybody there is just like you.” He slapped that desk lightly with his hand. “Here, you’re really different.”

           

Mr. Sterrett died several years ago, but that line lives in echo chamber that is my soul because he was right. We’re not talking about the difference between Vanity Fair and the Celestial City—there’s far too much manure in the air to make any heavenly claims about up here in Siouxland.

But living out my allotted years in a burgeoning new suburb of a huge metropolitan area would have made me a different person than my spending those years in what was, back then, an ethnic conclave huddled against the winds on the edge of the Great Plains. I chose a wooden-shoed monastic life, and, as Frost would say, that choice has made all the difference.

I say all of that because in my many years here I’ve never been anywhere near someone who might say to me, sardonically, in my distress, “So, Jim, where the heck is your God?”  Hasn’t happened—and likely won’t. I am surrounded by a cloud of believing witnesses. All of my friends go to church.

Had I stayed in urban, public education and American suburbia, I’d know people who might well ask me the very question that burns in David's soul. Some of them are still friends. Last summer I got an email from an old Greenway buddy, a “jack” Mormon, who wouldn’t let the silliness of my faith rest, in fact, because he’s quite adamant about having lost his long, long ago.

But I’ve been cloistered for almost five decades, and those few voices who might mock my faith are accessible only on-line. That doesn’t mean I don’t hear those burning questions. They rise, instead, from inside me somewhere. 

But what I’m wondering this morning is this:  if I’d have stayed in a more diverse neighborhood, would the voices I would have heard supplant the ones I now do, the ones from inside? What would be the pitch of my own personal faith had I spent my entire working life in the Valley of the Sun?

           

Questions like "Where is your God?" are here too, even in the cloister, packaged in the same taunting voice David heard, just not spoken aloud. That voice, that burning question, is here too, even in a cloud of witnesses.

But I’m thankful, very thankful, that God almighty has given me, as he did David, a faith that won’t let me take those voices to heart, even though I hear ‘em. Only by grace, can I come anywhere near to holding a faith equal to that task.