Sometimes, what is old and familiar can seem new. Something you’ve heard a thousand times will sound completely alien. This happened to me in recent months when listening to two people explain what they believed had saved them during horrific and terrifying experiences.

     While watching news reports featuring interviews with survivors of the April 15^th bombing in Boston and the May 20^th tornado in Oklahoma, I was struck by how unintentionally uncharitable the interviewees sounded while making what heretofore would have been – to me – innocuous comments.

     Steve Byrnes and two friends were standing near one of the bombers who placed a backpack on the ground and walked away. Byrnes, shielded from the brunt of the blast by the mailbox near where he stood, lost hearing in his right ear, some vision in his right eye, and has shrapnel near his jugular which has to remain there. His two friends each lost a leg. Speaking to a reporter, he said “I think about it all the time and for me, it’s like, you know, whatever you believe in — I believe I had a guardian angel over my shoulder that day and I thank God for it because it’s just, I know how lucky I am.”

     Shayla Taylor was in a hospital in Moore, Oklahoma when the tornado hit. In labor with her second child, Moore said she and the four nurses who huddled around her held hands and prayed. When Taylor mustered the courage to open her eyes, she could see outside; the walls of the room were gone. Three hours later, after being moved to a hospital five miles away, Taylor gave birth to Braeden Immanuel. “His middle name means ‘God is with us,’” she said. “The name had been picked out for months. Now I know why.”

      It was my reaction to the interview with Byrnes the month before which made me notice that the same sentiment was being expressed by Taylor. It is a sentiment I sometimes feel and had never questioned before. For some reason, though, listening to Byrnes was like hearing that thought for the first time, and it sounded ugly.

      When people say they have been saved from some unfortunate fate by the grace of God or his angels, what are they saying about the less fortunate? Byrnes believes he was saved by a guardian angel. His friends each lost a leg. Were there no angels for them? Were they less than worthy? Were there angels who decided they would save lives but not legs? Taylor believes god was with her in the hospital, as evidenced by the very presence of her brand new baby. Seven children drowned in an elementary school destroyed by the same tornado that tore the walls off the room she was in. Does she believe God was not with them?

     I don’t suppose these were questions contemplated by either Byrnes or Taylor when speaking to reporters, so they had no reason to consider the implications of what they were saying. There’s no reason to think the reporters themselves thought anything about it. We hear and say the same sort of thing so often that we’ve become inured to not giving any thought to what it might mean. I think about a common response many people give to being asked how they are doing. “I’m blessed,” they say. Do they think they are implying others are not? I doubt it.

     To think about these things would be the antithesis of what some people require in dire situations: faith. Ours is a culture in which faith and reasoning are not easily reconciled, so we tend to choose one or the other. The Second Epistle to the Corinthians, attributed to the Christian apostles Paul and Timothy, states explicitly that “We live by faith, not by sight.” Rather than trying to “see”, many of us resort to misquoting English poet William Cowper (“God moves in a mysterious way”) and are content to leave it at that. Delving any deeper would be disturbing. As for those for whom only seeing is believing, there is no use for faith.

      Byrnes and Taylor give thanks to what seems to be a fickle deity. This makes sense if one concludes that, after the beginning, Man – capricious creature that he is – created god in his image. That, of course, was of no consequence to God, who understood it was just a “man” thing. I imagine that understanding most likely extends to those who feel they have a dispensation when others don’t.