The Christian Century

Stubborn belief: Twenty years ago, Gerald Britt, a pastor in Dallas, lost an 11-year-old son to scleroderma. Last year, another son was murdered. The week after that son’s funeral, Britt found out that he has prostrate cancer. He has concluded that there is no theological explanation sufficient to make him understand the losses he’s experienced. Yet, he says, “I choose to stubbornly believe that God is good. The book of Psalms is punctuated throughout with these words: ‘The Lord is good,’ and there are no qualifiers. . . . I choose to stubbornly cling to that unqualified goodness—even when things that happen to me are not good” (DallasNews.com, September 25).