The Resurrection of Dinosaurs and Other Mysteries

There, with early summer dusk sun still warming the room, my son rolled over and squinted:

‘Mom, I don’t understand God on the cross and that thing.”

“That thing,” I assumed, was Christ— His crucifixion and Resurrection.
You know, the most mysterious and yet most fundamental reality to all of Christendom and the world.
Essentially, explain Mystery, Mom.

And yet despite its childlike semantics, the whole question felt far too profound coming for a two year old. He won’t even turn three until next Monday. He’s wearing a diaper and surrounded by a small monkey, panda bear, raggedy lion, and a teddy bear donning a Detroit Lions jersey. Who is this child?
I almost didn’t even believe he asked it.

At the same time, it makes sense. The Easter story has been ringing through our prayers and stories and songs over the past six weeks, and it seems the more we tell it and reclaim its truth, the more blurry it becomes. What feels electric and tangible on Easter morning is now grainy and loose, falling through unsteady hands. Thomas, in the upper room. I’ll believe it when I see it.
But I felt it, too: too great, too unlikely to actually believe. Or even begin to grapple with.

And so, I agreed with him. It is a hard thing, B. I don’t always understand it either.

A final tuck. A kiss. One last look before we all turn in for the night.
Out of the stillness, another cosmic question:

“But it was two mean things: the cross and the tomb. Two mean ones.”

B. popped his pacifier back into his mouth, a habit we have yet to begin to break. And I looked back at him all squinty and curious. He simply could not make sense of it: the cross, pain, death, life again, the whole thing. Expectantly, he awaited an answer.

The big questions always come out right before bed at our house. Mere seconds before you walk out the door— climate change, dinosaur extinction, the exact location of God, even where babies come from, all of this as one tired and pregnant mama is about to check-out.
And there are no easy answers to these questions.
No simple sentence or metaphor will settle the toddler into sweet dreams.
I myself have not found the trite sayings and token theologies satisfactory either, to be honest.

In fact, as I squat by that little boy, I realize that these questions only wake us up.
Questions like these bring us to life, stir our souls, discomfort us to the point of actually living.

I returned to writing during years of deepest questioning, doubt, and angst— when repressed questions, surprisingly similar to B’s, seeped from my mind and soul and began wrestling my actual body and chemical make-up and ability to breathe. We often think living is to keep going. But sometimes, real, true life is when every single seemingly essential things stops.
We roll over in bed and ask the scariest question with the sincerity and honesty of a little boy in construction pajamas.

From the surface, it seemed that the pain was rooted in my mental and emotional health, a valid and essential place to start. And yet as we considered genetics and the more biological components of my pain, I became increasingly aware that my physical limitations and mental healing were inseparable from my lived identity as a person; my motivations for relating and working and simply existing; and my core beliefs about God and faith and reality, truths I like to call my “axioms.”
If I was going to become whole, I had to wrestle ALL of it.
And so, as a way to stay sane through this Great Undoing, I began to write.

Tonight, B. is wondering about the very things I began to wrestle with head-on during February 2013, armed with a very narrow theology and the paradoxically powerful and yet limited language.
And like that restless toddle., when we start to question God and faith and the world and our very selves, we often begin with pain.
Two mean ones, as B. accurately points out.

What do we do with suffering? These brutalities like greed or genocide or war or the cross?
I think of the fields that are flooded beside our house, so marsh-like in the wake of storm after storm after storm that a mallard duck and his mate were swimming between the low corn stalks this evening. What of the farmers’ pain and the land and all the world that feels flooded with violence and abuse and trauma?

And then what do we make of death? All the funerals and causalities and victims and tombs?
I consider the young teenager who we buried a few weeks back, his parents and siblings at the church next door just last night seeking shelter from the first round of tornados. When despair and loss swirl and threaten like a thundering funnel, where can one really turn to find shelter and a foothold?

And when the night inevitably comes, either at dusk or in a dark night of the soul, how do we turn to God with hearts and minds and bodies full of this unforgiving reality?
Is there possibility for any other force in a world overrun by chaos and hurt?
How can we fall asleep in peace, close our eyes and trust in something when all our foundational truths and structures are breaking down from floods or torrents or winds?

Even now, I still don’t have clear answers for these “two mean ones,” pain and death.

But after years of rolling over in bed with questions and fears and doubts spilling everywhere, there are a few I have clung to with all my childlike might:
I trust that God honors personhood and freedom more than we could ever know or understand.
I hope in a redemption and a justice that is far more complete than my human mind could outline or define.
I (try to) rest in that terrible image of God on the cross, the one that is hard for us to wrap out minds around. The one of God suffering, and thus a God united in the pain of every human being forever— maybe even the writhing creation as a whole. A God who dwells even in the midst of the “mean ones.”
Precisely in the midst of the “mean ones.”

But it is bedtime, after all.
And the squirmy boy needs something to wrestle into sleep.
And so I tell him, and thus remind myself again and again and again:

Jesus did not stay dead, did He? God felt sad and pain. He died. But he rose again. He wins, right?

But B. is far too quick and relentlessly unsatisfied.
”So Jesus died like the dinosaurs? Jesus is extinct?”

The toddler connections were beginning to become clear. Jesus. Dinos.
Yes, how to make sense of all these mysteries that are unseen and yet dearly loved.
I smiled, and a Divine hope filled me there at his bedside.
Not answers. Not apologetics. Not even arguments.
But hope.

No, B. Jesus is not just like the dinosaurs. He did die. But he came alive again. And He is still with us. He is changing the world around us.
Dinosaurs are super cool. But they don’t live like Jesus does.

And as the golden light faded to a deep hush, the little ballerina in the top bunk and the questioning, fuzzy toddler in the bottom bunk practiced the Daily Examen, recalling ways we saw the Spirit work in love, joy and peace; patience, kindness, goodness, too; and finally, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control:
hugs after dance class,
picnic snacks at the park,
waiting for the tractors to plow the fields,
flying high on the swings.

And I saw God, too:
in the toddler who questions,
in the dinosaurs,
in the summer dusk,
and in all the unanswerable Mysteries that wake us up as we fall asleep.