Senseless

As I write this I'm rather pissed at God.

We're on the 65th day of school, and here are some of the personal tribulations that people have gone through already this year:

• One of our 4th grade teachers was pregnant and announced it to the staff. She was pretty excited; it was going to be her first. When she and her husband went in for the ultrasound they found out the fetus had died in utero.
  
• A 3rd grade teacher's husband was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer. There's always hope, but he's in a bad way.
  
• Our counselor's son has been to the best hospitals available to try and cure his health problems. He needs a couple different organ transplants. Last week the insurance company said they wouldn't pay for the procedure. She's now in a position of having to fight them for her son's life.
  
• A kindergarten teacher who retired a few years ago lost her battle with cancer. She was a part of the staff for better than 20 years, and lived the cleanest, most Christian life you could imagine. She died about the worst death you can imagine.
  
• One of the parapros went to Baltimore to take care of her daughter while she was having knee surgery. While over there, she has emergency surgery for a bleeding ulcer. Mother and daughter end up in the hospital at the same time.

And then there's one of the kindergarten teachers. A few weeks ago she gets the phone call that her dad has been diagnosed with cancer. On Thursday he has a hernia rupture and gets admitted to the hospital for surgery. On Sunday her Grandfather dies.

And then, today, her grandmother, who was a fixture in our school office for 40 years as the lead secretary, dies in a single car accident. It looks like she had a heart attack while she was driving. For this kindergarten teacher, her mother's mother and her father's father died on consecutive days. All this, while her father is getting ready to start chemotherapy next week.

If you tried to sell a story like that to Lifetime TV, they'd laugh you out of the building.

I don't get it. I don't fucking get it. I was raised Episcopalian, and now I go to the Catholic church with my wife since we've married, and my understanding was always that there was a grand design--there is a plan--and while we may not understand all aspects of that plan, you could accept it as a matter of faith that there was, in fact, a plan.

Right now the plan seems to be to shit all over this one family, and I don't get it.

A loving God, by definition, can not be a capricious God. Following that, then, there has to be a reason, and I can't see the reason. Lately I feel like there's more comfort in the idea that there is no God, because the idea that all this is part of a plan is repugnant. Random chance is an idea that I can live with, because sometimes that's just how the breaks fall. Science and logic I can accept, because cause and effect relationships are observable and explainable.

I can't explain, at all, the idea of a just and loving God who would act like this. "It's too big for you to understand" feels like a line of crap. I'm watching people of great faith suffer greatly, and I don't get it.

Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?