The Futility of What If…

Forty years ago tonight, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated as he left the Los Angeles hotel ballroom where he had addressed his supporters following his victory in the California presidential primary.  While I remember exactly where I was when I first heard the news of John Kennedy's assassination nearly five years earlier and was well aware of Martin Luther King Jr.'s murder in Memphis in April of 1968, the RFK assassination was troubling in a different way.

I was sixteen years old and woke up that next Wednesday morning to get ready for one of the last few days of my junior year in high school.  We lived in San Diego, 120 miles south of Los Angeles, and my older sister had a radio on in her room and had already heard the news.  She was the first to tell me what had happened.

They didn't have grief counselors or therapists at public schools in 1968, so we went about our business like it was any other day near the end of the school year.  There were chemistry finals to prepare for and English assignments to complete.  I think Mr. Reed, our remarkable U.S. History teacher, canceled his planned lecture and let us talk some, but for the most part we were left to try to figure out our confusing world as best a bunch of sixteen and seventeen year olds could.  Some of my friends said some really stupid things, as even then I knew sixteen and seventeen year olds sometimes do. 

In fact, as a young person watching and reading about the first presidential election I really understood, I had been something of a Eugene McCarthy fan.  But Bobby Kennedy had energized the nation.  Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, both in their mid-50's, seemed hopelessly old and not much different than the gray and frowning Lyndon Johnson who occupied the White House as I was becoming politically aware.  America in the age of assassinations was a scary place to be growing up.

Historians, young high school kids and you and I often ask, "what if?"  What if Lincoln had lived to usher in a time of malice toward none, charity for all and firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right?  What if Chamberlain and the French had not tried to appease Hitler as his troops pillaged Czechoslovakia? 

What if Robert Kennedy had gone on to win the presidency in 1968?  Would fewer Americans have died in Vietnam?  Certainly Watergate would not have happened and the national malaise that Jimmy Carter correctly diagnosed (but was unable to heal) might not ever have settled in. 

What if?  In the end, historians, young high school kids and you and I know that "what if?" is a futile question.  In fact, Lincoln did not live, Chamberlain foolishly proclaimed "peace in our time" and Robert Kennedy died very early that Wednesday morning when I was still a junior in high school.

Our God is not a God of the "what if?"  He does not ask, "what if the man and the woman had been obedient?"  Rather, he begins to sing the story of redemption.  He does not ask, "what if the man after my own heart had not been unfaithful?"  Rather, he answers David's prayer and restores to him the joy of his salvation.  He does not ask, "what if they had listened and accepted my Son?"  Rather, he breaks the gates of hell and sets the captives free. 

We are, every one of us, moral agents.  Our decisions matter and have consequence.  We have five months to decide for whom we will vote in November.  Our decision will matter and will have consequences.  We have to decide when to speak up and when to keep quiet as we seek to be faithful parents, friends and family members.  We have to decide where to go to college and how to spend our money, what medical treatment to use and which job to accept.  We have to decide whether to keep the promises made at weddings and baptisms.  Our decisions matter and have consequences and must be prayerfully made.

But having made the decisions to which our prayers have guided us (and sometimes having made a decision because we have to make a decision, not because we have prayed-for clarity), we don't ask "what if?"  We give thanks and seek grace to help in time of need.