God's Multiplication

From left to right: Dean Cynthia Kittredge, Clay Towles, Seth Olson (me), James Franklin, Jared Houze, Michael Carriccino, CJ Meaders, and Jeremiah Griffin

Yesterday I had the distinct pleasure of substituting for one of the regulars at our Banks-Caddell Homework Helpers program. If you have not had an opportunity to volunteer in that ministry, I highly recommend it. For most of the hour and a half I worked with four boys who were doing their math homework.

I quickly remembered some aspects of elementary mathematics. My multiplication table easily popped back into my mind (thank you Mrs. Albritton), but I struggled to distinguish between the distributive property and the communicative property. Do not even ask me what chunking is, for I still do not understand that demonic art! Yet what struck me more than my inability to remember mathematics was the spirit of the boys with whom I worked.

They were chipper and happy with just a pinch of rebelliousness. As I worked through their math worksheets with them I could see through some of their mischief, as one child in particular attempted to trick me into doing all of his work for him. After I convinced him that he should do his own work we worked together on a question asking another way of writing 8x5. The answer was clearly 5+5+5+5+5+5+5+5, but when I asked how he would write out 8x5 the boy answered, “50,000! NO! 50 thousand, hundred!” Maybe he was happy to get his homework completed, or perhaps it was working with friends, or even it might have been an adult sitting with him, but this child’s shear positivity overcame both his horrendous math skills and his inability to choose one of the four choices on the page. While I corrected him, I could not help but feel that his positive energy was hinting at a larger truth about God.

Sometimes in our world we can believe that the answer to our problems is one of four multiple choice answers. We might believe that we only have a few possible solutions to our challenges:

A. Make more money
B. Buy more things
C. Go it alone
D. Ignore the problem altogether

Yet, what this child of God reminded me is that God’s ability to multiply our time, talent, and treasure, our gifts, our prayers, and our lives themselves cannot easily be understood. 5x8 might as well be 50 thousand, hundred when God is at work! However, life soon challenged my new understanding of God’s greatness.

When I arrived home last night I discovered that Clay Towles, one of my best friends from seminary, had tragically died. The good feelings from Banks-Caddell melted away and I began struggling with all of the questions swirling around in my mind: Why did this happen? What could I have done to prevent his death? How could the church let one of its leaders suffer all alone? Why did Clay not reach out to others?

I fought hard all night with these questions desperately and irrationally hoping that by answering them Clay would return. He sadly will not. Instead I am left in a numb, heartbroken, and enraged mess. Somewhere buried in the tomb alongside our Savior Jesus Christ rests every bit of my grief, guilt, pain, fear, doubt, shame, anger, and confusion in the face of Clay’s death. Clay too is buried within that tomb.I do not know when or how or where it will happen, but Christ will raise all that is buried with him. One day the tomb, Clay’s tomb, will be empty. One day all those who believe will be resurrected to new life. One day all that we give over to God will be transformed in the mystery of God’s love. This is how God multiplies our lives: the pain of the Cross and death is transformed into the joy of the Resurrection.