I laughed out loud when I read reader Tammy’s remark on my “Gretchen Rubin: How Do You Move Beyond Blue?” post:

“I know that God will not give me more than I can handle. I just wish he didn’t trust me so much.”

My deacon friend said something similar to me one morning over coffee.

“You know that saying ‘God only gives you what you can handle?’ That’s a bunch of bull.”

The bull comes from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians:

“God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with your testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it” (1 Corinthians 10:13).

I’ve learned to restrain from offering that quote to a person in the midst of a tragedy. Wanting so badly to console my twin sister, I uttered Paul’s promise to her after her nightmare labor with little Henry: he was deprived of oxygen for some time during the birth (they don’t know how long) and subsequently has developmental delays and special needs.

Paul’s words were meant to console. But boy do they piss off cancer patients, 9/11 widows, and Katrina victims (just to name a few). I certainly can understand why.

What about people like Reader Pamela Williams who posted the following message on my “Honest to God” post:

My best buddy died January 4, 2007. He was only 2 yrs old. He had an operation and died the next day. And you say God is here? Right now? Because he wasn’t with Adev on January 4. My faith has left me. And I wonder why everyone else can still believe after January 4.

What about the family of Katherine’s preschool friend who just lost their three-month-old to SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) in January of this year?

Does God really think they handle that? I’m not sure I could.

I like St. Paul and I approve of most his letters (as long as I can keep my house, Honda, and coffee maker), but I’m thinking that on this whole misfortune stuff, I prefer the haiku by the Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa, whose life was marked with sorrow and adversity (he lost his mother at a young age, and his own children died):

The world is dew
is the world of dew,
and yet and yet….

Or the words of Black Elk, the Sioux Indian (who was baptized Catholic after his wife died in 1906): “It may be that some little root of the sacred tree still lives. Nourish it then, that it may leaf and bloom and fill with singing birds.”