When Faith Meets Uncertainty

When Faith Meets Uncertainty: Finding God in the Unthinkable

The human body contains between 13.5 and 17.5 grams of hemoglobin per deciliter of blood. When that number drops below seven, doctors administer blood transfusions. Below five is a life-threatening emergency. At 4.8, you're staring death in the face.

This is the stark reality one couple faced when jaundice—that telltale yellowing of the skin and eyes—progressed from a curious observation to a medical crisis that would span 57 days in hospitals across two cities. What began as a question about lighting became a desperate fight for survival, complete with misdiagnoses, institutional failures, hallucinations, and the agonizing wait for an organ transplant.

But this isn't just a medical story. It's a theological reckoning.

The Ancient Echo of Near-Death

The Bible contains its own captivating near-death tale in the story of Joseph. You know the one—the favorite son with the coat of many colors who couldn't help but tell his older brothers about dreams where they all bowed down to him. Unsurprisingly, this didn't endear him to his siblings.

What followed was a cascade of catastrophes: sold into slavery, falsely accused of assault by Potiphar's wife, thrown into prison, forgotten by those he helped. Yet somehow, through an improbable series of events involving dream interpretation and famine prediction, Joseph ended up as Pharaoh's right-hand man, second in command of all Egypt.

When his starving brothers eventually came to Egypt seeking food during the famine, they stood before Joseph without recognizing him. In Genesis 45, Joseph reveals himself in an emotional scene of reconciliation, weeping so loudly that the entire household could hear.

But here's where the story takes a theologically troubling turn.

The Problem with Providence

Joseph tells his brothers: "Do not be distressed or angry with yourselves because you sold me here, for God sent me before you to preserve life... So it was not you who sent me here, but God."

Wait. What?

If God orchestrated Joseph's rise to power, then God was also responsible for everything that came before—the betrayal, the slavery, the false imprisonment. If we credit God with the happy ending, we must also blame God for the suffering that preceded it.

But we know exactly why Joseph suffered. His brothers sold him out of jealousy. Zuleika falsely accused him out of spite. Potiphar imprisoned him based on a lie. Human choices, not divine intervention, created Joseph's nightmare.

So how can we reconcile this?

The same theological dilemma emerges in modern medical crises. When someone survives against impossible odds, we're quick to say "God saved them" or "it's a miracle." But if God gets credit for the survival, doesn't God also bear responsibility for the illness, the institutional failures, the suffering along the way?

The Uncomfortable Either/Or

This presents us with an uncomfortable binary: Either God is responsible for everything—including childhood cancer, natural disasters, and systemic injustice—or God is responsible for nothing.

The first option is theologically repugnant. A God who deliberately causes suffering, who allows hospitals to make fatal mistakes, who orchestrates trauma as part of some grand plan—that's not a God worth worshiping. That's a cosmic sadist.

But the second option seems equally problematic. What's the point of believing in a God who exists but never intervenes? Why dedicate your life to serving a deity who remains perpetually on the sidelines?

Neither answer satisfies. And that's okay.

Living in the Questions

Sometimes the most honest theology is the theology that admits it doesn't have all the answers. The question of why suffering exists in a world supposedly governed by a loving, all-powerful God—what philosophers call "the problem of evil"—has vexed theologians for millennia. There's no neat solution.

Is God unwilling to prevent suffering? Then God isn't all-loving. Is God unable to prevent it? Then God isn't all-powerful. Does suffering exist because God doesn't? Then what are we doing here on Sunday mornings?

None of these options provide comfort. The honest answer is: I don't know. You don't know. None of us really knows.

What We Do Know

But here's what we can know with certainty:

We know that people survive because other people fight for them. Parents who refuse to accept inadequate care. Spouses who advocate when their partners can't speak for themselves. Medical professionals who dedicate their lives to healing.

We know that love—genuine, sacrificial, tenacious love—makes life worth living. The kind of love that sits in an ICU room for weeks, that learns the names of every nurse, that puts on headphones to drown out delusions because listening is too painful.

We know that beauty exists. That joy is real. That peace is possible. That generosity transforms communities.

We know there's something transcendent about laughing with friends over dinner, about your favorite song washing over you at a sold-out concert, about stumbling upon a piece of nature that takes your breath away. These moments feel like they come from the same source, the same wellspring of meaning that defies easy categorization.

A Different Kind of God-Talk

Maybe we need a different way of talking about God—not as a puppet master pulling strings, not as a cosmic vending machine dispensing miracles, but as that transcendent source of love, beauty, connection, and meaning that makes life worth living even when it's unbearably hard.

Maybe God isn't the one who causes or prevents suffering, but the presence we discover in the midst of it. The force that compels us to fight for each other, to show up, to keep hoping when hope seems irrational.

Maybe crediting God for survival isn't about divine intervention but about recognizing that love, community, and human dedication to healing are themselves sacred acts.

If you want to call that feeling—that transcendent experience of love and beauty and connection—God, that's okay. If you need a different word, that's okay too.

What matters is that we keep showing up for each other, keep fighting for survival, keep choosing love even when the outcome is uncertain.

Because in the end, that might be the only theology that matters.