Fairness

I have been thinking a lot about how we look at life and how we evaluate it. Seems to me that we are constantly making a judgment about it on the basis of the present condition. Something like those jokes about the bar being only a foot wide, boo, ah, but 200 yards long. Yeah. We got a good health report, life is good. We got a bill from the IRS, life sucks.

Of course, there is really no way to know about how life is until the end. Because events keep happening which might change the verdict. But I also think that there is a kind of narrowness about our judgments. The woman who gets lung cancer was bitterly complaining that life is not fair because she had done none of the things that are associated with lung cancer. No smoking. No second hand smoke. She had eaten all the right foods to reduce your risk of cancer. Had not lived in an environment that was supposed to have cancer causing elements. Life was not fair. As if that was something horrible. It only happened to her.

But she was not thinking about the fact that she lived in a place where there was tremendous medical resources to help her. That there were women all over the world who had lung cancer who did not have access to treatment. That is not necessarily fair either. She certainly was not looking at the fact that she lived in a house that was twenty times larger than the homes of most of the people in the world. That was not fair either. But the unfairness of that is not a problem for her.

Life is not fair. But there are a whole lot more "unfairnesses" that are in our favor as citizens of the USA than there are against us. We do not really have much of a leg to stand on when we run into one of the unfairness and feel like complaining. Life is not fair and nobody should ever try to explain that it is. In fact the last great message of the Christian story is that God is unfair and unjust. His forgiveness does not seem to be given just to those who deserve it. Life is not fair. That CEO's get paid 400 times what a school teacher gets paid is not fair or just, but it is. But the school teacher gets paid way more than the field worker in Nepal. The field worker workers physically harder than either one of them. But what happen to Jesus was not fair on Friday and what happens to us in God's forgiveness is not fair either. But most of us do not complain about that.