2010.01.04
“Do you still believe in God?”
More than two years since my then pregnant wife was hit by a truck, we are still asked that question from time to time.
Our answer: Yes, we do. More than ever.
It’s easy to understand why the question. The logic goes: We’re Christian but our God had apparently failed to protect us. We had been good people but bad things still happened to us. In short, it’s the age-old question mankind has long asked herself, from philosopher-king Plato to grand historian Sima Qian: The good suffer and die, the bad prosper and thrive, where’s God or Kuan Yin or Tao?
For us, our answer is no more difficult to grasp: God didn’t put that truck on the pedestrian’s lane to hit my wife on the head – a reckless driver did. We live side by side in a society, we get careless and somebody gets hurt, as simple as that. Unless we expect to have a totalitarian God – which has been only too often on our wish list and to-do list, unfortunately – it is not a god question but a purely human one: why are we in such a hurry? Why can we not refrain from talking on the phone while driving? Or have an oppressive economic machinery that puts sleep-deprived drivers on the road? I’m not that sure of our innocence.
Hong Kong is one tract of land on earth where about three people are killed every single week in traffic “accidents”. Tragic? Yes, but not of God’s making.
But our God could’ve spared us somehow with his much-hyped almighty… Now that’s some nasty self-righteous thinking we refuse to give into. For it implies that non-believers are more deserving of evil and mishap, which is simply not true. Our prophets in the Old Testament would not have us fallen into that trap of self-pity, in exile as in emergency.
But spare us God did. Somehow, the hit on my wife’s head wasn’t a centimeter higher or lower, more to the left or to the right, or else my entire family might have already been history. Somehow, the baby in her womb survived both the shock and the full anesthesia. Somehow, a pediatrician was on the spot, and took the risk to give us a hand to assess and monitor the state of both mother and child before the ambulance arrived. Somehow, a “civil safety” officer was also nearby, who happened to carry around him a bandage the size of a sandwich and a heart the size of a lion’s, to help save my wife from excessive bleeding. Meanwhile, our third angel, who happened to be driving following the truck when the hit-and-run happened, was putting his life on the line pursuing the culprit, who eventually helped the police nail him down.
Somehow, there were still exceedingly competent, caring and responsible people working in Hong Kong’s public hospitals, which are chronically over-worked and under-salaried. (So much so that there’s a “joke” among the nursing staff: Last life we earned a curse, this life to be a nurse!) Somehow in this city famed for its make-a-quick-buck mentality and worse-than-chicken-farm habitat, complete strangers offered us accommodation in their home (basically their own bedroom), out of nothing but church friends calling church friends’ friends. (Somehow also complete strangers ran to us offering “free” legal assistance, but they obviously belonged to a whole different category.)
Somehow, somehow.
We were hit by a reckless machine, but we were also cushioned by godliness everywhere we fell. And that cushion ultimately triumphs over the steel, for it is enveloping as it is absorbing. The Christian God we believe in is not a bullet-proof vest that guarantees bodily safety, just as he is not a slot machine that promises wealth and health. Instead, what is guaranteed is an invitation to a banquet of suffering: first as co-habitants of human society, then and more as co-bearers of the cross, for to share in godliness is to partake the passion of Christ, not as detached observers but as vulnerable participants. But with us it always comes with a cushion.
More deserving people have found less sympathy and synchronicity. We’ve had plenty. Sure, my wife’s back still hurts. My daughter’s heart condition might have something to do with the accident. And my breathing stops when big vehicles pass us by. But we’re still here. That’s all the reason to be thankful for.
Our Chinese friends would say: it is “great luck in great unluck”. Our British friends might say: “We don’t do God.”
And for us: We don’t believe in luck, computable or not. We believe in a God who still “do” us.
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