There’s an anecdote about C.S. Lewis that I’ve always enjoyed. One of his friends told of walking down an Oxford street with him one day, when they were accosted by a beggar. Lewis stopped and gave the man some money.

“You know he’s just going to go off and drink it up, don’t you?” the friend asked as they went on their way.

“Yes, well,” said Lewis, “if I’d kept the money I’d have probably gone off and drunk it up myself.”

There’s a wonderful humility and recognition of shared humanity in that story, I think.

Some people take the wrong lessons from such stories, though.

The essential thing is that Lewis was giving away his own money.

Years and years ago, I sat in on a teaching session led by a Lutheran pastor (we’ll call him Pastor Number One). He told a story of his own, one which (he thought) taught a profound lesson. I think it taught a lesson too, but not the one he thought it did.

Pastor Number One had taken a pastoral educational class which called for a “real world experiment.” Each pastor in the program was required to pack away all his clothing and his wallet, put on old, dirty clothes, and go out to spend a few days on the street as a homeless person.

Pastor Number One told, with some indignation, of getting in to see the pastor of a church (let’s call him Pastor Number Two, shall we?). Pastor Number Two had looked at him and said, “You’re strong and healthy. Obviously you’re able to work. Why don’t you get a job?”

“He was lecturing me!” Pastor Number One exclaimed, recalling the outrage. “I was hungry! I needed food! I didn’t need a lecture!”

I’ve often thought about Pastor Number One over the years, and it seems to me his righteous indignation was a little unjust.

Because the fact was, Pastor Number Two had had his number. Pastor Number One was indeed strong and healthy, and perfectly capable of working. He had come into the church under false pretenses, and had lied in Pastor Number Two’s face.

Pastor Number Two (if my experience in a church office where I saw [and helped] a lot of transients is any indication) had probably, over the years, developed a pretty good nose for bovine sewage.

What Pastor Number One saw as cold-heartedness, was in all likelihood just the exercise by Pastor Number Two of his fiduciary duty not to waste the money entrusted to him by his congregation (as well as a determination not to enable unhealthy life choices, or treat grownups like children). If Pastor Number Two was being judgmental, so was Pastor Number One.

And Pastor Number Two had the moral advantage of not being a liar.

Evangelical Outpost linked today to this article, questioning the traditional understanding of the martyrdom of Lady Jane Grey. Even if all it says is true, for me it doesn’t diminish the pathos of her youthful martyrdom.

Then I read an article about Auschwitz in Smithsonian Magazine.

So I’ve been contemplating human suffering today.

Have you ever thought this thought? I’ve thought it many times: If I had been God, and had known that giving human beings free will would result in all the evil and horror that have in fact been produced, I wouldn’t have given them free will. And if the human project was unsatisfactory without free will, I’d have just skipped the whole business.

I have an answer that satisfies me intellectually. 1 Corinthians 2:9 says, “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him.”

Apparently, in God’s economy, the good He is creating far outweighs all the innumerable evils perpetrated by man since the fall of Adam. From the viewpoint of eternity, we’ll look back and say, “Yes, it was well worth it.”

Now that answer raises a hundred questions in my mind. Questions for which I have no answer, and for which we have been given no plain answers.

This, I guess, calls for faith.

But it also argues, I think, for courage on God’s part. Granted, He saw the outcome from the beginning. But part of that outcome, I believe, was His own assumption of all that evil on the cross.

I read somewhere that, in the early years of the Superman comic strip, the writers came to a crisis when they’d made their character so powerful that they couldn’t come up with a challenging enough opponent for him anymore. That was when they invented Kryptonite. Something that took all that power away.

God did it in real life.

I can’t find the reference, but G. K. Chesterton wrote somewhere that all those scoffers, who call God evil for creating an evil world, are right in a sense, and that God acknowledged it (in a way) by explicitly accepting the punishment for creating all that evil.

Whatever else you think, I think you’ve got to admit it’s no cowardly strategy.