Does anyone know where the love of God goes?


This week marks the 50th anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, immortalized by the song from Gordon Lightfoot, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald." It's a haunting song with the haunting verse, "Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?" Certainly in extreme life and death situations like this, we can feel abandoned by God. 

There are other circumstances where one may wonder "where the love of God goes." Poverty, for one. I've been thinking about poverty, or more to the point, people who are poor, a lot this past week. On Friday, I participated in a Poverty Exercise at the Dream Center in Peoria. The approximately 50 participants were divided into families of 3-5 and given a task of items to accomplish, mainly surrounding paying bills. I was a disabled father-in-law, who was reduced to making suggestions and watching helplessly as my daughter and son-in-law scrambled to cover bills with not enough money. Despite pawning a diamond ring and sending their teenage daughter to get a parttime job, we were evicted from our home by a landlord who seemed more interested in kicking us out than collecting the rent. 

The exercise reminded me of my time working in child welfare and how difficult it was for my clients to think beyond surviving the day. Transportation in Peoria is especially challenging. If you have to get your children to daycare and get to a job all on the bus (to say nothing of the grocery store and the doctor's office) life seems impossible. 

A few days after this, I traveled to the Dominican Republic and saw a different level of poverty. Homes made of tin and cast off wood with no running water and dirt floors. Lovely people who cannot read or write and are fleeing political violence. 

We might wonder where the love of God has gone, but these people don't seem to doubt him. In fact, through them, I felt God's presence more keenly in this poor settlement than I do in the cities of the United States. I get a little nervous putting this sentiment in words. It can be misrepresented as, "The poor are so happy" which in turn can assuage us from thinking we have an obligation to relieve people's suffering. I think their faith in God is so strong because, other than the support of their family and neighbors, it's what they have. It's not the love of God that has gone, but the love of the human community.



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