My husband recently told me of someone he knows who has a child with disabilities, and that the child has been near death several times throughout her life. The father told my husband about the child’s most recent battle for her life, which included the hospital chaplain attempting to help prepare the family to remove life support. Instead of complying, the mother told the chaplain, You can go to hell! I’m not giving up. The father admitted to my husband that he sometimes says, Go to hell, God!
My husband said he couldn’t imagine ever telling God {or anyone else} to go to hell. While he wasn’t being judgmental of the parents, neither could he understand the emotions that would lead someone to say such. Of course, I assumed the role of devil’s advocate:
God is big enough to handle our human emotions. He aches along with us in our sorrows and frustrations. He knows the fear behind words masked as anger. Even if the words don’t come out of our mouths, he knows our most intimate thoughts anyway.
I can’t imagine there not ever being at least one time in our lives when we’re overwhelmed with deep emotion which produces cries of the heart that might not otherwise ever be vocalized. While I’ve never even come close to losing a child, I’ve experienced grief in other ways which resulted in me crying out in anger to God: Dammit! Do something! You’re God! My heart was saying, I have no control over this. Things are not going like I want or think I need them to be. You are God. You can do something about this. Please, step in and fix this, but do it my way. I want to surrender, but I’m afraid.
I have to believe that God doesn’t worry about the words that come out of our mouths so much as he cares about the hearts producing the words. If I tell God to go to hell, it’s because I’m angry over the fact that I have no control. I have to believe He knows that, and that His heart softens at my fear of lack of control. Instead of being angry with me because of the words that come out of my mouth, He invites me to trust Him.
Maybe there was a fragment of trust in the stubborn words of a fighting mother who told a chaplain where he could go. Maybe there’s a fragment of trust in the angry words of a father who recognizes that God could change things. Maybe there’s a fragment of trust in our hearts every time we cry out to God…no matter which words we use in speaking to Him.
