Carol Brennan King March 25, 2020

Were you blindsided by the Covid 19 pandemic? I was. Did it feel like you were Blindsided by God? Did you see this as a bad dream, the kind that happens to other people and the kind you wake up from, sometimes in a cold sweat.

Like the rest of the USA, when I went to the grocery store two weeks ago, I was thinking about a couple more weeks’ food supply, but a little bigger than I would normally buy. The second time, only a few days later, with more news, I was a bit more serious about this thing, thinking a few more weeks and food that would keep, like instant potatoes, canned chicken or sea food, rice and canned tomato products.

Then a couple of days ago, with more news and warnings, we hit Walmart at supper time, and it was almost empty – great shopping conditions for someone who falls in that age range, more vulnerable to a bad outcome. Anyway, it was good that everyone was home eating supper, even if it was their supper that cleaned off the shelves at the store.

But back to that Blindsided by God thing. That’s part of the title of a book written by Peter Chin.

The rest of it is Disappointment, Suffering, and the Untamable Goodness of God. Chin was excited about his future. Settled into family life with a wife and two children and venturing into his first church plant experience in the Washington D.C. area in 2009, the future looked exciting. The Chins bought their first house, and before the ink was dry on the contract the house, it had been looted, the kind of looting that includes the sink and toilet.

The next months brought one challenge, disappointment or you could call it tragedy after another. Chin is brutally honest as he talks about their miscarriage, the looting of their home before they moved in, the theft of anything left even on the porch, like shoes, and then his wife’s diagnosis of cancer.

IF you think that sounds bad or heavy, imagine the doctor saying, “You know you are pregnant?”

I had purchased this book many months ago, but it was at the bottom of my pile. now rising in concert with our world falling apart with the spread of the Covid 19 virus. What makes this book especially good is that Chin doesn’t try to preach at you, or say how nothing discouraged him because after all, he had God.

No, it is brutally honest about how hard it was to be hit with any one of the challenges he and his family faced in 2010, to say nothing of the accumulative pain of one nightmare on top of another. And it makes for the right reading when you might be feeling some of the struggles Peter and Carol did.

So the book is still available on Amazon, a used version less than $6.00. It might help you put things in perspective today. And it might help you feel less a bad person for questioning the goodness of God. Finally it just might help you recognize the narrow beam of light at the end of the tunnel.