There are times when pronouncing the providence of God sounds like an indictment of His character. I have found that chaplain work includes many such moments. Statements like, “It was just his time” and “God must have wanted him for something” fall like icicles crashing on hard pavement.

I am presently bedside—figuratively at the moment, but literally for much of the night last night—waiting for a friend to pass. He trained with me in Indiana this summer, getting ready for the deployment to Iraq. David was always smiling and always joking and usually saying something ridiculous. He was much younger at nineteen than the average age of our force. David was a kid in our midst. When I first met him, he came to me with the earnest belief that God had appointed him for a purpose. There was something big he was supposed to do, he just didn’t know what yet.

David went over to Iraq in August, but after a month he was returned to Walter Reed for medical issues. He spent the last seven months at Walter Reed taking one or two appointments a week. Last week he was driving home for the long weekend when he got himself going the wrong way on a highway. He hit a semi truck head on. Now his family and I are gathered in Baltimore waiting to say a final “Goodbye.”

This is not the first time that the traditional Calvinist view on providence has been difficult to play out as a minister. Yes, I insist that God appointed David’s days. Yes, I insist that God is in charge, everywhere and every moment. But it seems sometimes like there are little pockets of chaos even within the fabric of God’s providence. Every now and then, we pass through these pockets of chaos, or pass over them, or they pass by us, and we shiver.

You want to say, No, it wasn’t God’s will and it wasn’t God’s action. God is just as angry as you. God is just as saddened as us that we have to experience death. That’s the whole point of going to war against death. God despises death and will ultimately destroy it. This stuff isn’t what God wants. But nevertheless, God is God.

There are theological answers and philosophical arguments. Eventually the parallel lines do intersect, if you extend them out long enough over time and space. Eventually, if we try hard to take the God’s eye view, we will see the good of every event—or the good that God brings out of it. But for the time being, as a chaplain trying to bring comfort and solace, and the Gospel, to a family in despair, the questions seem more powerful than the answers.

This war has brought out of our Soldiers a new kind of struggle in faith. The death and destruction in this war is random. In the old days, the Soldiers took the line of battle. They got shot. They died. These days it’s not so tidy. Driving down a street to deliver stuffed animals to a school, a man drives out onto the road in a taxi, looks you in the eye, and explodes. The moments of chaos happen at random. Soldiers turn to God as a talisman blessing their vehicles and carrying signs of God’s power like a lucky Bible or a handkerchief with a Psalm on it. These signs and symbols become important. In a world of chaos they symbolize a God of order Whose power is beyond random events.

But God is not a butler, nor a bodyguard. These holy relics bring no power in the end. God is God, and God is faithful in purposing our good no matter how it may appear to us. A choir director at a former church of mine taught the children’s choir a little song. I have a recording of it on my iPod: “What God Ordains is Always Good.”