The sudden shaking warned me that something was wrong. Then deathly stillness. Then a fierce shaking again. I ran out of my room yelling for my father and met my little brother in the family room. My father and stepmother ran downstairs to see what happened. Then I heard yelling, and I didn’t understand any of it. I was frozen in place. I thought someone had driven their car into the house, and I didn’t want to go downstairs and run into some drunk driver. So I stayed upstairs—where I thought I was safe.
More screaming and hollering.
I couldn’t move.
Then I heard a woman’s voice yell over all the noise. It sounded like my stepmother: “Grab your brother! Grab your brother and get out of the house.”
That voice was familiar. That voice I could trust. And suddenly I could move. I grabbed my brother, ran downstairs, and out of the house. I had no idea until we were outside that our escape route was literally moments away from being cut off. The fire department didn’t arrive until ten minutes later. If I hadn’t heard her voice cut through the other yelling with a clarity nothing else had, my brother and I would have been trapped upstairs with no firefighters around to save us.
That was the day I started asking God why He allowed so much suffering in the world.
Years later, I asked God why nobody ran into the house to help us outside. There was an entire crowd in front of the house, yelling and hollering. I watched T.V. I knew what someone was supposed to do. Someone brave and strong—my father—was supposed to run inside and rescue my brother and me. We weren’t supposed to be abandoned to the flames. I was only 16. I was too young, too terrified to have to save myself and a young boy.
Throughout the years, I have asked God why He didn’t give me family that protected me. Why was I left to deal with so much trauma, abuse, and neglect on my own?
But I wasn’t alone.
There was a voice that night that told me what to do. Interestingly, when I mentioned it to her later, she didn’t remember yelling it.
I do not know if God provided that voice in some extraordinary way or simply made sure that, amid all that chaos, hers was the one voice I could hear. What I know is that I heard exactly what I needed to hear, exactly when I needed to hear it.
Furthermore, there was a striking “coincidence”: the flames did not escape the garage until immediately after my brother and I fled the house. Our exit was cut off in mere moments.
Want to know what caused the shaking? The force of the fire inside the garage blew off the vehicle door—the metal one that lets cars go in and out. That door was far stronger than the little wooden door leading from the garage into the house. Yet the wooden door remained completely intact.
Someone could say, “Maybe you just didn’t notice the smoke.” Nope. I later served as a firefighter in the Navy, so I’m familiar with smoke. I once choked on it when my safety gear failed—and I was on a separate floor from the fire. So I can say with confidence that if there had been smoke in that kitchen, I would have noticed it. I saw none. I smelled none.
And when I ran past that kitchen, I still thought I was running from a drunk driver. I had no idea the house was on fire.
But by the time I ran outside and across the street, the flames had spread dramatically. They quickly consumed the entire house.
And as I watched my home burn, there was a peace that reigned over the terror threatening to overtake my soul.
Could all of that have been coincidence? Perhaps. But taken together, those details became part of the reason I came to understand that night as an instance of God’s protection from both fear and death.
So I began a journey. I started asking God “why” repeatedly for years. If God was so good, why did He allow me to experience so much pain? If God was so powerful, why didn’t He prevent the flames?
I didn’t know it at the time, but the night my home burned was the night I began a very long journey of discovery, frustration, and revelation. And eventually I stumbled upon a little poem called “The Weaver.”¹ It goes like this:
My life is but a weaving
Between my God and me.
I cannot choose the colours
He weaveth steadily.
Oft’ times He weaveth sorrow;
And I in foolish pride
Forget He sees the upper,
And I the underside.
Not ’til the loom is silent
And the shuttles cease to fly,
Will God unroll the canvas
And reveal the reason why.
The dark threads are as needful
In the weaver’s skillful hand,
As the threads of gold and silver
In the pattern He has planned.
He knows, He loves, He cares;
Nothing this truth can dim.
He gives the very best to those
Who leave the choice to Him.
Once I heard this poem, I never forgot it. The poem gave me an image I could never shake. I do not mean that everything terrible that happens is therefore good, or even that every evil is necessary. A dark thread can still be dark. But perhaps seeing only that thread does not give me enough information to judge the whole pattern.
Something about it resonated with me: the idea that I saw a mess because my perspective is limited while God sees the whole picture. And that is why I started this blog. The Great Tapestry is an incredible metaphor for how God engages with His creation. When we look at the backside of a tapestry, all we see is tangled, knotted threads of clashing colors and values. And attached to every thread is a question that can be explored.
Over the years, God taught me many things. He withheld a great deal of knowledge as well. In time, I learned that God is genuinely trustworthy. I may not understand everything, but I eventually found reasons to trust God’s character even where I lacked an explanation for events.
But as I spoke to others, I realized I wasn’t the only one on this type of journey. Many people have shared their stories of struggle and pain with me. I have heard about sickness, abuse, trauma, and loss. I have also heard people reject God because they could not accept that a God who is both good and powerful could really exist. I have listened as one man told me he knew God was real, he knew Christ offered reconciliation, he simply preferred his life of sin. At least he was honest.
I realized there were more questions than I had answers to. That is as true today as it was then. But because I realized this theme of suffering and God’s goodness and power was such a big issue, I decided to go to the people who were supposed to have all the answers. The scholars. I went back to college to get my master’s degree in biblical exposition.
And I learned. Not everything, certainly. Mostly, I learned how to seek answers rather than simply collect them. The college I attended, Liberty University, did an excellent job of teaching me, if nothing else, to ask questions. I got in trouble with one professor because he felt I didn’t attempt to question any of the material written in the book we were supposed to read. Don’t just accept what the author is saying, my professor lectured me. Question it. What do you agree with? What do you disagree with?
I admit this concept was quite new to me. I grew up in a household that did not care for questions. I served in the Navy; whether I agreed or disagreed with an order was irrelevant. But in college, I learned that scholars are surprisingly comfortable with disagreement. It turns out, scholars thrive on disagreeing about something (everything). It’s not just, “I disagree with you.” It’s, “You can disagree with me, and that’s totally fine.”
This seems rather obvious in hindsight, but it was revelatory to me. So I want to bring that same concept into this blog. I am going to explore questions, find plenty to disagree with and plenty to agree with. I am going to face hard questions that are specifically designed to topple Christianity—if it can be toppled.
Because one thing I learned since that night of the fire is that Christian faith is planted on a very, very solid rock. And if Christianity is true—which it is—then it can handle the tough stuff. I’m not holding back, I’m not flinching from the ugly, and I’m not hiding from the agony. My life hasn’t given me the privilege of living in a padded bubble, and I’m not going to start now. I’m going to hit Christianity with the biggest hammers I can find—and we can watch, together, what happens.
Christianity is true. I know that. Which means it doesn’t need weak arguments to protect its integrity. If an argument fails, let it fail. If a question can’t be answered just yet, it can’t be answered just yet. That’s okay. But I am not going to cocoon the truth. The truth must stand on its own merit.
We won’t find all the answers. I’m not bothered by that because I’m also going to introduce you to a methodology called CAT. One of its simplest principles is that exhaustive knowledge is not required for justified knowledge. I don’t need to understand every atom that makes up a cat before I have sufficient evidence to recognize one. Likewise, a question can contain unresolved details without leaving the larger conclusion unknowable. The important question is whether the unresolved evidence is strong enough to defeat the conclusion under the standard of proof being used.
My own investigation and personal experiences have provided more than sufficient reason for me to trust the Heavenly Father. This blog is where I intend to show you why—and why trust need not be blind. In Acts, the Bereans are commended because they “received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so” (Acts 17:11, ESV).
Let’s be like them.
¹ The poem circulates in several forms and has been variously attributed; an earlier version by Florence May (Alt) Gibbs appeared in 1892.
