Excerpt taken from "Tracks of a Fellow Struggler" by John Claypool

Context: Claypool, a pastor, wrote this after his ten year old daughter, Laura Lue, died of leukemia. He is responding to the suggestion that, to endure the suffering, he take "the road of unquestioning resignation." I have underlined the parts that really stuck out at me.

The first of these routes comes highly recommended, and I would label it “the road of unquestioning resignation.” If I have been told once, I have been told a hundred times: “We must not question God. We must not try to understand. We have no right to ask or to inquire into the ways of God with men. The way out is to submit. We must silently and totally surrender. We must accept what God does without a word or a murmur.”

Now there is both ancient and practical wisdom in this approach to deep sorrow, and in one sense it is utterly realistic, for if I have learned anything in all of this, it is just how weak and ineffectual we humans are against the immensities of life and death. Since I was powerless a month ago to do anything to avert this agony, why bother now to struggle with it? I repeat, there is a wisdom of sorts down this road of unquestioning resignation. The only trouble is, it is not a Christian wisdom, and in fact it is a denial of the heart of our faith. I have been frankly dismayed at how many deeply devoted Christians have recommended this way to me, and I have wondered to myself: “Don’t they realize what such an approach implies about the whole of existence?”
To put it bluntly, this sort of silent submission undermines the most precious dimension of our existence; namely, the personal dimension. It reduces all of life to a mechanical power transaction. To be sure, a leaf submits to the wind without saying a word, and a rock allows the flood water to do whatever it pleases without murmur, but are these appropriate analogies for the relation of God and man?

According to the Bible they are not, for in this document the mystery of Godness is depicted as involving more than brute power. The One who moves through these pages is by nature a Being of love, “a Father who pitieth his children,” rather than a Force who knocks about a lot of helpless objects. And of course, words and questions and dialogue back and forth are at the heart of the way persons – especially fathers and children – ought to relate.

Where, then, did we Christians ever get the notion that we must not question God or that we have no right to pour out our souls to him and ask, Why? Did not Job in the Old Testament cry out to God in the midst of his agony and attempt to interrogate the Almighty? Did not Jesus himself agonize with God in Gethsemane, telling him how he felt and what he wanted, and then cry out from the Cross: “My God, My God! Why? Why have you forsaken me” Would the verse “Ask and it shall be given to you, seek and you should find, knock and it shall be opened unto you” ever have appeared in Holy Scripture if unquestioning acquiescence had been the way to meet tragedy?

I, for one, see nothing but a dead end down this road of silent resignation, for it is one of those medicines that cures at the expense of killing the organism it is supposed to heal. After all, my questions in the face of this event are a real part of me now, and to deny them or to suppress them by bowing mechanically to a superior Force is an affront not only to God and to my own nature but to the kind of relation we are supposed to have.

There is more honest faith in an act of questioning than in the act of silent submission, for implicit in the very asking is the faith that some light can be given. This is why I found such help in a letter I received from Dr. Carlyle Marney just before Laura Lue died. He admitted that he had no word for the suffering of the innocent and never had had, but he said, “I fall back on the idea that God has a lot to give an account for.”

Now, to be honest, no one ever said anything like that to me before, and at first, it was a little shocking, but the more I thought about it, the truer it became to the faith of the bible. At no point in its teaching is there ever an indication that God wants us to remain like rocks or even little infants in our relationship to Him. He wants us to become mature sons and daughters, which means that he holds us responsible for our actions and expects us to hold him responsible for his!

I do not believe God wants me to hold in these questions that burn in my heart and soul – questions like: “Why is there leukemia? Why are children of promise cut down at the age of ten? Why did you let Laura Lue suffer so excruciatingly and then let her die?” I am really honoring God when I come clean and say, “You owe me an explanation.” For, you see, I believe he will be able to give such an accounting when all the facts are in, and until then, it is valid to ask.

It is not rebelliousness, then, but faith that keeps me from finding any promise down the road of unquestioning resignation. This approach is closer to pagan Stoicism than Christian humility. I have no choice but to submit to this event of death. Still, the questions remain, and I believe I will honor God by continuing to ask and seek and knock rather than resigning myself like a leaf or a rock.