My wife and I are on our congregation’s Prayer Team. Each week we receive an email containing many prayer requests for the needs and concerns of our members and their loved ones. We also receive briefer emails during the week of urgent requests, often accompanied by news of an accident, health crisis, or some other unexpected tragedy. The person making those requests often woke up that morning expecting another normal day, but then had their world turned upside-down. Instead of their usual routine, they spend the day in a hospital ER waiting room, getting pulled out of a wrecked car for a helicopter ride to Rochester Mayo, or, notifying loved ones of a death in the family. It is a sad business to be reminded so often of how fragile and uncertain our lives are, and of how anything can happen at any time to anyone, including me. There are days coming when it will be me.
I have always liked Billy Crystal. I still do. I enjoy his humor, his wit, and the occasional bits of wisdom blended in with all the jokes. He has a deep appreciation for his Jewish heritage, and has humorously described his ongoing conversation with God.
Billy Crystal had a very bad year in 2025. In January his home for 46 years burned to the ground in the California Palisades Fire. In December of that same year his good friends Rob and Michele Reiner were murdered in their own home. It happened just hours after Crystal and his wife were with them at a party. Devastating.
In a recent interview, Billy Crystal says he no longer talks to God. “Not anymore,” he said, “because I don’t trust him. Too many bad things have happened. The earth is in bad shape. This is a weird, scary time.”
I certainly sympathize with Billy Crystal. He is not the first person to turn away from God after a tragic time in their life. And, I am not sure what I would be like after experiencing so much loss. We must be humble enough to realize we cannot say for certain how we would react. Life can get pretty rough. When it becomes my turn for big trouble, I might well be angry with God, with questions about His love and care. But I do hope that I would still keep talking to God. And I think I would, even though my prayers might, for a while, be filled with anger, disappointment, and doubt.
You see, a bad year for Billy Crystal or me or anyone else does not really provide any new information about God and his ways with the world. Lives are getting upended all the time, all around us. Getting my Prayer Team emails tells me that much, and so does even a brief look at the local, national, and international news. Billy Crystal was born in 1948, three years after World War II. That was also a “scary time” for a world in “bad shape,” to use his words. The trouble has always been there. And God has always been there. It is sad, and we can’t get it all figured out; but it is nothing new.
Billy Crystal’s life took a tragic turn when his father died when Billy was only fifteen. A few years ago, Billy wrote a one-man show about years in his parents’ home called 700 Sundays. His dad always worked two or three jobs, six full days a week, and only had Sunday to spend with his family; so, ‘700 Sundays’ was all the time Billy had with him. Parts of the show describe the conversations young Billy had with God. I have not seen the production, so I do not know the content or depth of those conversations, but he was talking to God. Then, Billy Crystal went on to live a much-blessed life, with a solid 56-year marriage, children and grandchildren, success in many different endeavors, and all the fame and wealth anyone could ever ask for. Was Billy Crystal not aware that all that while, there was untold misery, anguish, and grief going on all around him? The only thing that changed in 2025 is that it happened to him… again. I can sympathize with his pain. But I do not understand the thought process that will then say, “I don’t trust God anymore.” I can better understand someone who says “I never trusted God.”
I believe there are many solid reasons to trust God in good times and in bad times, even when it is not easy. However, I do agree with what Mac Sledge (played by Robert Duvall) said in the 1983 movie Tender Mercies: “I don’t trust happiness. I never did. I never will.” But trusting happiness is something very different from trusting God. We should trust in God, not in happiness.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974), while dying of cancer in his late 40’s, wrote The Denial of Death. The book would win the Pulitzer Prize. It was required reading when I was in seminary. It was not an easy read, filled with deep and complex insights from psychology, philosophy, anthropology, and history. But the book had a simple point: We do much to avoid the fact of our inevitable demise; and much of our behavior is driven by our underlying terror of death. Instead of denying it’s reality, we should face death honestly and prepare for it. He wrote:
I think that taking life seriously means this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, and the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise, it is false.
“The rumble of panic underneath everything.” We all know that feeling. I was a pastor for forty years. I knew my members, and I was aware of the anxieties and worries underneath all those Sunday morning smiles. I know my own troubles and apprehensions about the future. I get those weekly, and sometimes daily, reminders in the Prayer Team emails of what is happening all around me. The story of Billy Crystal in 2025 is just one example of how so much can change in such a short time. We have an uneasiness about this fact, always lurking in the shadows of our life; and it doesn’t take much to awaken the dread that is just beneath the surface of our consciousness. The rumble of panic underneath everything.
Becker says we must listen to that dread and take life seriously. We have to live our lives in the truth that anything can happen. We have to be prepared, and our preparation has to be based on something true, not false. I want to live my life by the truth of the Bible, which says, “The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.“
How to be prepared will be the subject of tomorrow’s meditation.
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Deuteronomy 33:27a — The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.
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Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. Amen.
–John 6:68
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In the two-minute film clip below, Mac Sledge describes some tragedies in his life, and he keeps saying, “I don’t know why.” We usually don’t get it all figured out. But Mac prays about it. He’s never going to trust happiness, but he does begin to trust in God. He keeps talking to God, he comes to believe in Jesus, and he and his step-son get baptized on the same day. On the way home from church, his step-son son asks, “Mac, do you feel any different?” And Mac says, “Not yet.” Brilliant. He doesn’t say ‘no;’ he says ‘not yet.’ There is a lot of ‘not yet’ in the Christian life, and we have promises of a wonderful future in eternity.
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