I Will Love You

It’s 1943, and the last pocket of resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto is about to collapse. With enemy tanks just down the street, Yosl Rakover, barricaded in his house, writes his testament and hides it, hoping that it will someday be found.

     “My rabbi,” he wrote, “used to tell me, again and again, the story of a Jew who escaped the Spanish Inquisition with his wife and child and made his way in a small boat across the stormy sea to a stony island. A flash of lightning exploded and killed his wife. A whirlwind arose and hurled his child into the sea. Alone, wretched, discarded like a stone, naked and barefoot, lashed by the storm, terrified by thunder and lighting, his hair disheveled and his hands raised to God, the Jew made his way up onto the rocky desert island and turned thus to God.

 “‘God of Israel,’ he said, ‘I have fled to this place so that I may serve You in peace, to follow Your commandments and glorify Your name. You, however, are doing everything to make me cease believing in You. But if You think that You will succeed with these trials in deflecting me from the true path, then I cry to You, my God and the God of my parents, that none of it will help You. You may insult me, You may chastise me, You may take from me the dearest and the best that I have in the world, You may torture me to death—I will always believe in You. I will love You always and forever—even despite You’”

     There is no higher faith, I’m telling you, than when a man puts himself totally and absolutely into the hands of God to do His will, regardless of the cost. It is the central act of moral courage that is found at the heart of Christianity. But it involves a paradox, which Fosdick captured when he said of the cross, “Everything that most makes men disbelieve in God is there; everything that most makes men believe in God is there.”

     “You are doing everything You can to make me not believe in You—insulting me, chastising me, taking from me the dearest and best, torturing me to death”: Why have you forsaken Me?

    If You think that You will succeed with these trials in deflecting me from the true path, You are wrong. I have come to this place to follow your commandments and glorify Your name. I will always believe in You. I will love You always and forever: My God, My God.

     Nothing tests our commitment to the will of God like suffering that seems senseless. Which is why I say that man is not capable of a greater demonstration of faith than when he loves God despite God, trusts Him when He seems untrustworthy, and pursues Him when it seems that God has turned His back. This is the stuff of Job, and of Habakkuk’s prayer, and of the fiery furnace, and of the lion’s den, and of Stephen, and of the thorn in the flesh.          Kenny Chumbly