The Right Place

Perhaps you’ve seen the same Forwarded email that I received recently about always being in the right place. It describes the reasons why a number of people never made it to the World Trade Center on Sept 11, 2001. They are alive today because they had gotten a blister and needed a band aid or been stuck in traffic or missed the bus. Things that seemed irritating at the time, were, in fact, the events that saved their lives. Thus, the thought goes, we are always in the right place, it’s all good and it’s just our perspective about negative events that needs to change. God always makes sure we are in the right place.

All of this is true – to a point. It’s easy to say that God’s providence saved the diverted individuals, but this line of thinking would imply that God deliberately didn’t save others. Were they too in the “right place” even though they got swallowed up in an inferno? Their survivors probably don’t think so. I can’t believe that God willed some families to lose a father or mother or that any one life was more precious to God than another’s.

Partiality doesn’t sound like the loving God who would become human and subject himself to the worst our species had to offer.  I’m sure that research would uncover just as many church goers among the dead as among the living and just as many whose fateful choices led them to the World Trade Center as away from it. What we have or have not done can’t be the measure of why some people still grieve a loss and others are thankful to be alive.

So, the “right place” isn’t necessarily the place which avoids the suffering; maybe the “right place” is simply wherever we are because God’s outstretched hand is there, too. God is able to heal the wounds made by those whose free will causes our pain. It is people who are at the root of our hurt and frustrations and the degenerative nature of our bodies explains our sickness and unavoidable death. All God can do is reveal the responses and attitudes that will lead to our inner peace in the midst of it all.

To say “Alleluia” in the midst of emptiness, darkness and confusion is the ultimate statement of faith. It arises from the belief that love never fails, that the right place is in the arms of God and that the more love we cast into the world, the less chance there is for others to act badly.

The world will change because people decide to change it, not because we wait around for God to do it.