When do you decide?

I was always amused by those jokes that had a series of statements: The town had only building in it. Boo. It was a bar. Yeah. It was only one foot wide. Boo. It was thirty yards long. Yeah. and on and on it went. The joke was never finished and you could never know whether it was a tragedy or a comedy. Whether it ended on a "yeah" or a "boo."

The same thought was expressed in a song Frank Sinatra sang. I think the chorus went something like "There isn't much that I have learned in all these many years. Except that life keeps turning in cycles, first there's laughter, then there's tears." Our lives and history keep alternating between the good and the bad. Robert Browning question was whether the chess board is white with black square or black with white squares.

I remember the comment that Germany became the most modern manufacturing country in the world after World War II because it had to rebuild all of their bombed out factories. The Allied destroy all of their manufacturing facilities and then after the war helped them to rebuild. Of course, what was rebuilt was built state of the art new.

Certainly no one would try to say that the tears aren't real or that chaos and destruction is good. Evil and suffering are real, but the cycles just make it so much harder to give a final verdict to life or history. The earthquake in Haiti is horrendous pain and suffering. No possibility of a next turn of the wheel to something good makes the situation positive. But at the same time such a horrible event does not make all of life and history negative either.

The cycles are not connected to any kind of moral or ethical standard. That debate is as old as human thought and no where has any link been found. Good people have bad things happen and bad people have good things happen. Pat Robertson absurd comments about Haiti have no substance in history. Perhaps Robertson ought to read the New Testament. The best person in History, Jesus,got the worst punishment humans could give.

If one is to be helped in taking a stance towards life and history from the New Testament, then I would suggest that Jesus' resurrection is the revelation that the last line of the joke is a yeah.