Why Me?

Why me?

Plastered onto an intensive care hospital bed. In traction, broken from head to toe. Severe pain. Burning mental images of the speeding car coming at me head-on. It’s inevitable the question would arise.

That intense query, “why me?” or “what did I do to deserve this?” likely wells up in the heart of any who find themselves in the throes of excruciating trauma.

In a seemingly two-dimensional, cause-and-effect world, it’s natural to trace backwards from tragedy in search of an apparent reason. Maybe it’s something about me. Maybe God’s mad at me, punishing me. It sure feels like it.

Such haunted ponderings can inject increased angst—fear, sense of rejection and a responsive bitterness—into the soul of someone who’s in an already insufferable situation.

While lying in intensive care surrounded by beeping monitors, it proved helpful to call to memory spiritual principles about all this. Jesus had anticipated the inevitable question of “why me?” along with our tormenting tendency to read judgement or personal rejection into tragic experience.

There had been an incident in Jerusalem in Jesus’ day in which a tower collapsed on a number of bystanders, fatally crushing eighteen of them. Why were these particular people there at that moment so as to be victimized? After all, the odds of any one of them being at that specific place at that exact moment were perhaps infinitesimal. Were they purposely chosen to be there in order to get what was somehow coming to them?

In the first agonizing days after my head-on collision I found myself pondering questions like, why was I at that exact highway location precisely when I was? What if I had delayed my departure by just a minute or two? What if I had taken an alternate route, which I had actually considered doing?

As with the tower victims, the chances of me being at that exact spot at the very moment of the crash were extremely slight. Surely God could have caused me, or those crushed by the tower, to not be at the tragic scene at the fateful moment. Why didn’t he? Was he giving us what we somehow deserve?

Jesus directly refutes the sense of judgement or personal rejection in such reflections. Referring to the crushed tower victims, he asked, “Do you think they were more guilty than all the other people who live in Jerusalem?” His response to that thought, that the cause of their tragedy was to be found in themselves, is as crucial as it is straightforward—“I tell you, no!”

His assessment is the same regarding a man born blind. Someone asked him, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Refuting the simplistic assumption of moral cause-and-effect, he responds, “neither this man nor his parents sinned”. If the blind man or his aggrieved parents were haunted by self-incrimination or badgered by social stigma due to the birth defect, Jesus desired them to be free of it.

More significantly, he went on to explain that, in effect, there’s another unseen dimension in painful situations—not an angry deity but a loving Heavenly Father who can transcend any set of circumstances. Jesus said of the man’s congenital blindness, “…this happened that the works of God might be displayed in him.” He went on to heal the blind son.

Instantaneous healing or easy escape from traumatic circumstances is often not our experience. But the broader principle is clear-- with or without quick rescue or miraculous healing, God, the unseen actor, can somehow deeply comfort and bless those of us in the grip of a terrible situation. It remains for us to learn to take his hand and let him.

Looking back through the difficult months since the collision, I can see that my initial wrestling with the question of “why me?” and embracing biblical insight—that God is for me, not against me, even in the midst of unthinkable trauma-- provided a starting point for healthy emotional processing through this hard season of my life.

Those who minimize the value of biblical insight might dismiss it as theoretical, simplistic or irrelevant.

While plastered on an intensive care hospital bed, in traction, broken from head to toe, in severe pain and seeing burning images of the speeding car coming at me head-on, I found it essential.

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Luke 13:1-5 John 9

Bob Levin can be contacted at bob_levin@sbcglobal.net