The life of Jonah Winters, a Michigan-based insurance clerk, collapsed overnight when he received the news that his three children and his wife of 15 years had been killed in a car crash involving a drunk driver. There are few things that are as painful as losing your loved ones. Struck by grief, Jonah fell into a deep hole of sadness and despair. He became depressed, and after losing his family, he also lost his job, his trust in God, and his will to live.

But even in our darkest moments, the light of faith can bring hope and joy back into our lives, as local pastor Douglas Dimley demonstrated earlier this week by delivering a personal 90 minute sermon on the theodicy to the distraught widower. “Sure, it’s bad that your wife and children got plastered across the street by a drunk driver, but have you ever thought about how great it is that we have free will? Imagine if we didn’t have free will and were all just perfect like angels? Don’t you find that having the freedom to choose between good and bad gives a special meaning to our lives?”

Pastor Dimley’s lecture included an uplifting diatribe on the hermeneutics of suffering in the Old Testament, an exegesis on choice verses from the Epistle to the Romans, and as if that wasn’t already good enough, there was even a sweeping overview of various medieval and modern theologians with a broad outline of their positions on the origin and appropriate response to evil and suffering.

“Before the sermon, I was sad because I lost my family,” Jonah told us, “but now I understand that this is really the best of all worlds. I am not God, so what right do I have to complain anyway? If you don’t know much about theology, life might seem rough sometimes. But now that Douglas explained moral positivism and essential kenosis to me, I understand that things are much more complex than I ever imagined. Learning about theodicy literally saved my life.”

When asked what had given him the strength to deliver such a detailed and uplifting sermon on the question of suffering, pastor Dimley responded by saying: “It must all have been part of the divine plan. When I went to seminary, we had so many courses on theodicy where we read and talked about all the responses to suffering in the Christian tradition. At the time I wasn’t sure what all that had to do with my ministry, but now I understand that it was God preparing me to care for those who are in need.”

According to pastor Dimley, the story might even have a happy ending: “If his wife and children were saved, and he is too, then they might even see each other again one day.”

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