Does it Matter?

Asking unanswerable questions and inviting you to join!

Ryan and I spent New Year’s Eve at the hotel in Austin where we got engaged. After hosting Christmas, we were excited for a little getaway just the two of us, and as Austin is only a few hours’ drive, it seemed like the perfect place to go.

We dropped Jo off at Nana’s for the night, tanked up the car with gas and ourselves with coffee, and hit the road.

Ryan is many things: a fairly good driver, a present and warm father, a source of quiet fortitude in our family, a deviled egg enthusiast. But he is also, as shown by the artwork in our home, the random YouTube videos he watches late at night, even the song that was playing when he proposed to me at the aforementioned hotel in Austin, a massive Radiohead fan.

I, decidedly, am not.

Before marrying into this world, I knew the song Creep (because everyone does) and that was the sum total extent of my knowledge of the band.

Ryan, on the other hand, knows everything about them. (Ok, probably not everything – I can feel him rolling his eyes at this while reading it. He’s not like, a weirdly big Radiohead fan. He’s just a big Radiohead fan, ya know?)

I mean, we have multiple coffee table books in our living room dedicated to their music and album art, so, you decided.

All this to say, on our drive down to Austin that day, we found ourselves listening to a two hour podcast all about the history of Radiohead and their music.

Now, for those of you who, like me, are normal – that is to say, are not huge Radiohead fans – here are some quick hitter facts about the band that will change your life in no way other than to set the stage for what I’m trying to write about today:

• They’ve released nine studio albums between the years of 1993-2016

• They’re largely regarded as one of the most influential bands in history

• Their music is…complex / advanced / intricate? They employ a lot of unconventional structures and time signatures in their music that other bands just simply weren’t doing at the time (according to the podcast!!).

It’s interesting to hear explained, even as someone who has no real emotional connection to their music, but the part that really stuck with me, and the point I’m taking an extremely long time making, is the question of purpose that was asked all throughout the episode.

The host was interviewing a Radiohead expert and music theorist (is that a thing?) and really focused in on a lot of the “easter eggs” you can find in their music.

I won’t go into too many details here because I’m sure you, like me, don’t really care! But it’s the idea that certain combinations of time signatures, lyrics, and even the sequencing of songs across albums seem to add layers of meaning.

And the host kept asking the interviewee expert guy, do you think they did that on purpose?

To which he responded, multiple times, I don’t really think it matters.

His stance was that the magic of the music and all the various nuances and layers therein was beautiful and meaningful and all the things fans tout it to be regardless of whether or not those choices were deliberate.

The significance didn’t depend on the intentionality.

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My faith in this season has felt a bit worse for the wear.

It’s not something I’ve talked much about with anyone other than my therapist and a little with Ryan because it feels very vulnerable to say outloud, especially when things haven’t exactly resolved.

For a while, I wasn’t even sure how to name it, really. Christians like to use words like “distance” or “drought” when describing this kind of thing but neither of those felt fitting.

The word that feels closest is unsettled. That feeling of walking back into a room you’ve been in a hundred times before and suddenly everything just feels slightly askew. Like the picture frames were rearranged or the furniture all moved one inch to a left and no one seems to notice it but you.

That’s what my faith has felt like recently. And the most frustrating part was that I couldn’t understand or explain why.

Until that moment – sitting on some random stretch of I-35 listening to that random woman on that random podcast ask the question, does it matter?

And I realized I’ve been asking that question for years and am only now starting to care about the answer.

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My spiritual journey (ugh, forgive the phrase) has been a wandering one, for sure. I was raised peripherally evangelical, came to Christ in earnest at a hardcore frozen-chosen presbyterian church in college, did a stint at a mega church in Dallas, another at a more charismatic one in NYC, and finally settled in the Anglican church where we baptized our baby and plan to stick it out for a while.

This to say, my exposure to, comprehension of, willingness to struggle with, and general tolerance for questions of free will, predestination, and other light topics has been…broad.

And in that breadth, I realize I’d taken a pacifying comfort in answering the question does it matter with a whole and hearty maybe!

When it came to certain events or circumstances, happenings in my life — losses, coincidences, griefs, heartaches, joys — I was constantly questioning whether or not that thing was specifically ordained by a sovereign, all-knowing God or was simply something that happened within the bounds of free will that God had then “used” for some other purpose in my life.

The Calvinist presbys I used to run with would say it’s the former.

The southern evangelicals, on the other hand, seem to be addicted to the latter. To this idea that God uses everything in our lives to draw us closer to Him.

You’re experiencing something difficult? You’re being refined.

You’ve been taken down a notch or two in life? You’re being taught humility.

You’ve come across financial difficulties? You’re learning the gift of relying on God.

You’ve been hurt so deeply you feel you can’t trust anyone? Trust me to tell you that now you will be holy enough to put your trust in God.

It’s an idea that’s aligned with scripture, to be sure. God disciplines his sons – we see that in multiple places in scripture and at times, this has been a comfort to me.

As someone who desires a closeness with God, refinement and humility and reliance and trust in Him are beautiful gifts to be given.

But at some point, that quickness to assign meaning to whatever hardship I was facing devolved into an expectation of sorts. That a hard lesson was coming just as soon as I got too comfortable in any one thing.

If I feel convicted about my spending, I assume Ryan or I will lose our jobs in order to teach us to be better stewards.

If I experience a season of doubt or disillusionment or just a general lack of discipline in spiritual things, I start looking for the next loss that will surely come my way to “draw me back” to a closeness with God.

Somehow the idea of God using all things for our good and His glory has turned into a constant anticipation of when the other spiritual shoe will drop.

It’s a tension I’ve struggled through but largely quieted in my spirit for a long time with the pacifying assumption that the answer is probably multi-faceted and maybe too mysterious to wrap my head around.

Without knowing it, I’d asked myself the question, does it matter, and answered, surprisingly, I don’t think so?

Until I experienced a loss I could only make sense of on one side of that coin. A miscarriage at 12 weeks — a loss that swept me off my feet in a way I’m still not really recovered from.

And in grappling with that loss, I wrestled through purpose and pain, grief and loneliness, deep sadness I hadn’t experienced in quite some time, and an accidental stumbling into the realization that suddenly, the answer did matter to me.

Because if the loss was by design, if it was ordained such that it would be a useful tool in drawing me or Ryan or whomever further towards God, I no longer accept the terms on which that arrangement stands.

I simply cannot allow for an innocent life to be lost so that I can be a better Christian.

And I know that’s a vast oversimplification.

I know it’s much more nuanced than that.

I know that the mystery of God and of suffering is not as binary as this argument of - intentional or not - which is an extended version, I think of - free will or not - and if it is, then it isn’t something we as humans are capable of answering in full. Not really.

But if you’re asking me - or rather, if I’m asking myself - does it matter, and the answer in this case is a resounding yes, it goddamn matters, then where does that leave me when the answer is likely unanswerable?

Unsettled, for one thing.

In a room full of uneven picture frames and furniture just slightly off center.

Because I am not interested in a faith that involves simply running around and putting bandaids on everyone’s pain with ideas of the SuPeR VaLuAbLe lesson they’re learning in return.

Nor am I interested in a faith that’s simply a constant recalibration of my “holiness” and a battery of refining experiences in response. (And also, aren’t we already made perfect in that whole now and not yet kind of way through Christ??)

But am I interested in one where shit just happens willy nilly and God’s role is to come in after the fact and just try to make the most of things?

Am I interested in following a God who’s just kinda working with what He’s been given, circumstantially speaking?

Probably not.

Which is good news, since I don’t think those are the only two options.

But the third option - which is to say, likely the right one - continues to elude me.

Did Thom Yorke (lead singer of Radiohead for all you non-fans) write those specific lyrics to pair with that specific time sequence or was there no deliberate connection and Radiohead fans have been merely created meaning out of something accidental for years and years?

Do bad things happen to us in a broken world because God designed it to be that way (whether by direct intention or the allowance of the enemy’s schemes or whatever other spiritual explanation we want to emphasize) or do they just simply happen and Christians are so obsessed with having answers for everything that we play God and assign our own meaning to our pain?

Is it discipline or is it what man intended for evil God intended for good (Gen 50:20)?

If you read that verse in earnest, it appears that man’s intentions and God’s intentions for the same act can coexist and contradict.

Which, one could assume, might be that elusive third option we’ve been hunting for. Maybe two things can be true at the same time. But whose intention came first, the chicken’s or the egg’s? Thom’s or the fans’? God’s or mine?

Does it matter?

I think so.

And if you’ve read this far hoping I’d wrap this up with a satisfactory answer to the various questions I’ve hung on this crumbling hearth, I’ve got unfortunate news for you.

Instead, I was actually hoping to crowdsource some thoughts on this. Knowing, of course, that we likely aren’t going to solve the problem of sin and suffering here on this Substack.

But I have to imagine that if you are a human navigating faith and loss and life in the way I think all of us are, I bet you’ve thought about this at some point. I bet you’ve experienced some deep and terrible loss and considered the why of it all. I bet you’ve questioned what you’re “supposed to be learning” when faced with some kind of challenge. I bet you’ve heard Creep at least once in the last decade and maybe even sung along with the chorus.

And if at least one of those things is true, I would love to know how you’d answer the question, does it matter?

Because of the many things I do not know in this unsettled season, I do know that the struggle to fight for truth and clarity and discernment does, in fact, very much matter.

And I hope to continue to foster a space here where we fight that fight with the freedom to speak openly, a willingness to be wrong, grace towards poorly formed arguments (hi, it’s me), and faith in a God who is not afraid of our questions.