Kimberly Emerson

When a new baby is born, it comes into the world with one question already programmed into its brain: “Why?”  Who, what, when, where and how will come with time, but our obsessive need to know why is there from the start.  Why is the sky blue?  Why do I have to brush my teeth if I’m going to get new ones later?  Why do cats have fur?

These, at least, I can answer.  If I truly still care, there is a long, complicated reason why the sky appears blue to us.  (Something about blue being a higher frequency and more likely to be absorbed by the light than red or yellow.  You can check it out for yourself at www.sciencemadesimple.com.)  It’s important to brush your teeth as a child so that you establish good dental habits while you can still afford to make mistakes.  Cats have fur because God loves us and knows that we still need soft things to snuggle with when we’re too old for teddy bears.

The problem with the whole “why” thing is that we keep asking it as the years go by, and the questions just get harder.

Why did she find the right guy and I didn’t?  I go to church every week, and she thinks religion is for sheep.  But she gets the guy who adores her and marries her, and I get all the guys who disappear into the wind after a couple of months (sometimes weeks).  Why did she get the reward?

Why did my two wonderful friends have so many problems having a second baby that they finally gave up?  They’re wonderful people, terrific parents to their first child, and would have made a sensational home for any new child.  Instead, the easy pregnancy comes to the fifteen year old who had sex for the first time in her life, and will now make herself sick trying to figure out how to ruin her life the least.  What sense does that make?

Why did someone with a wife and two kids and everything to live for have to get cancer?  He was a great husband and a great dad.  She was a single mom when they met, and by the time I met them you couldn’t tell which one was his biological child and which one he adopted unless they chose to tell you.  Oh, and did I forget to mention that her older son’s father had died too?  So that now that little kid will think every man he looks up to will abandon him?

How is that fair, God?

I don’t have the answers to any of these questions.  All I can do is trust that God has a plan.  I have to tell you, sometimes it seems like God’s plan is completely random.   Well, that’s what I say in my more charitable moments.  At less generous times, I wonder if God actually wants to hurt people.  I like to think of myself as a person of faith.  Sometimes, however, that faith is worn so thin it seems likely to disintegrate if I expose it to one more spiritually rainy day.

But maybe as a person of faith, it’s important to admit that I have these days.  To come out and say, right on the World Wide Web, that sometimes I, Kimberly Emerson, get angry with God.

I can’t remember the exact conversation where we discussed it, but I remember that it was my former minister Pastor Terry who introduced me to the concept: if you’re angry with God, it’s okay to tell God so.  If you don’t, you’re just going to take your anger out on someone else, and let’s be honest – God can take it.  Everyone else, maybe not so much.

It rocked my whole spiritual world.  I kind of expected to be struck with a lightning bolt or something.  It was scary as all hell, but I was really angry.  I’d tried my whole life to make everyone else happy, and it was starting to dawn on me that there really wasn’t going to be a great reward for it.  People who never worried about what anyone else thought were finding great opportunities by tripping over them, and I was stuck with the leftovers.  Something deep down in my heart felt that getting mad at God made sense.  After all, I was trying to be perfect because God wanted me to.

It felt a little childish to look up at the ceiling and scream, “What do you want from me?”  But at the same time, it felt kind of good.  So I did some more.  I yelled out everything I was mad about, and explained every instance where I’d been slighted.  I demanded answers.  No, I demanded retribution.  I was not going to be the Great Runner-Up in life anymore.

When I ran out of steam and tears, what I got was the feeling that something out there said, very quietly, “I love you.”

It wasn’t anything as dramatic as an audible voice, just a feeling.  I wasn’t even sure what loved me.  God.  What that meant exactly, I didn’t know.  (Still don’t.)  But I got the sense that someone or something out there loved me.  Whether I was perfect or not.

After I calmed down, other images came back to me.  Times that I had hurt people.  Times when I was a lot less perfect than I wanted to be.  I had no right to judge anyone, nor to begrudge them their blessings.  (If indeed that’s what they were.  Lots of things look great when they’re not in your life.  I remembered that too.)  And as for all the other times, well, I could see that virtue was at least kind of its own reward.  Even if I failed, it was nice to look back and know that sometimes I had tried to do the right thing.

As anyone who knows me can tell you, it wasn’t a miracle cure.  I’ve had more temper tantrums over the years that God has had to hear.  (My cat now gets to listen to them too, once in a while.)  Most of the time, though, when I quiet down, I get the same feeling.  Nothing material has changed.  But I’m loved.  And that changes me.

I’d still like the answers to all those “why” questions.  Meantime, I remember this:  The unfairness of the world is real, but God’s love is real, too.  That love will be with me through – as a coffee mug at my church puts it – “all the days that end in Why.”

Kimberly doesn’t know all the answers, and on most days she accepts that.  Her cat Zoe knows, but she isn’t telling.