The Christian Story: An Opiate for Human Suffering?

October's Edition of "Field Notes from the Shadowlands" by Lanie Anderson

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The Today Show cohost Sheinelle Jones returned to morning television last month after losing her husband of almost two decades, Uche Ojeh, to aggressive glioblastoma. On the day of her return, Today aired a conversation between Jones and Savannah Guthrie, one of the show’s main co-anchors.

I watched a short video clip of her interview and recognized that Jones was practicing apologetics live on national television, even if that wasn’t her intent. She admitted to Guthrie how she understands now why people walk away from faith in God in the midst of suffering:

I can easily understand why, when people go through something like this, they turn away from their faith. There are times where I’m like, “God, I’ve been praying for this job since I was in fifth grade… and you got me all the way here, and you take my husband? God, are you kidding me? Like, really? What did I do? Why me? There can’t be a god. Like, no way a god would do something like that to Sheinelle. There’s no way, right?” It would be very easy to think that.

Jones continued, explaining that Ojeh’s faith throughout his battle with cancer became the fail-safe for her own hope in God:

But you look at somebody like my husband? His faith kept him going. You talk about faith over fear? He had it. And when he was low, there was nothing I could say. There was nothing anyone could say. The only thing that would soothe his heart would be, like, praise and worship music. And it would just give him this peace. And I watched him in his toughest moments. His faith is what gave him peace.

And so I think, okay, if Uche can have faith when his life is on the line, surely I can. And surely we all can. And so I saw him hold on to it, and so then I held on to it as well.

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Underneath Jones’s questions is a more fundamental question that theologians and philosophers alike have been asking for millennia: “If it is true that God is all-powerful and all-good, why does evil exist?”