Dark, Light, and Joe

If God is truly God, he watches over day and night, guarding his creatures as they do what they were made to do:

The high mountains belong to the wild goats;
the crags are a refuge for the coneys.
The moon marks off the seasons,
and the sun knows when to go down.
You bring darkness, it becomes night,
and all the beasts of the forest prowl.
The lions roar for their prey
and seek their food from God.
The sun rises, and they steal away;
they return and lie down in their dens.
Then man goes out to his work,
to his labor until evening. (Psalm 104:18-23)

We might think the Psalm is glossing over the challenges here, as if this world weren't full of glitches, turmoil, pain. The Psalm isn't painting over reality. It's simply seeing God as the one who maintains this broken world and makes it work. The fact that there are lions and prey means this isn't a pretty world with not a single flaw in it. The writer of this Psalm knows that.

I am puzzled and dismayed, though, about Joe. Joe went off his medication and ran away from the protected home situation where he was living. No one could find him for a couple of weeks until he was found dead of exposure in the freezing night air in a small town fifty miles away. With his compromised mental state, he never had a chance. He needed someone to take care of him, but that didn't happen.

Maybe God's to blame, the God of the night and the day who feeds the lion and supports the common worker. But the Bible's bedrock assertion is that the world is broken because of us, because we walked away from the One who made us. And our often cold and cruel environment rises up against us in protest.

I don't know why Joe died, why there wasn't a bubble of protection around him. But I do know two things - God is still awesome, though I don't understand him, and our world is still in his hands, even though we lost Joe.