It left me scratching my head. You too?

Nadya Suleman’s octuplet story is part medical-miracle, part freak show for the millions of outsiders who nothing about her. I’m just like you, asking all the normal questions like How’d this happen? Are they healthy? and Who’s your daddy?

Once word got out that momma’s already raising half a dozen youngsters at grandma’s house, public philosophers flooded the blogosphere with a collective outrage. In time, we might know more, but for now such reproductive logic is beyond our comprehension.

After I skim the social questions (Are taxpayers left holding the diaper bag?) and the domestic questions (How do you run a 24/7 daycare?), I’m left with the God questions. You see, whenever I discover man tinkering beyond his natural reach, I find myself trying to sort out the sovereignty of God all over again, wondering how he can really be in control after all.

If an unprincipled fertility doctor, some powerful drugs, and eight frozen embryos can work around the natural order of things, I get a little crazy. It’s not supposed to be this way. Doesn’t God get to establish the natural laws? This had to have happened on his watch. The God I know doesn’t slip out of the room for a couple of minutes while all the troublemakers screw things up. He knows all the sperm donors by their first names, whether they live in the house or not, so how did he let these little buggers get away with such hyperbole?

I’m stuck between envisioning a mind-blowing God who can fling galaxies around, and a God who can apparently let us design our own space. It’s striking how both births and deaths bring me to the same questions. When beginnings and ends are predictable and comfortable, it’s way easier to say it all falls on the sovereignty of God. But when the stories stretch beyond my comprehension, now it seems like he’s blindfolded. It’s the same feeling I get when I observe global conflict and innocent lives lost at the hands of both monsters and governments. Where’s God in our self-made disasters, and if he knows all about them, why won’t he make things right?

My husband reminds me that from my little confined space, I have no chance of knowing the answers. Solomon lived in a little box, too, and the book of Ecclesiastes echoes my frustrations. A clever blog won’t get it done. A good conversation over coffee with a smart theologian won’t really help me out either. Even the Bible’s answers come packaged in a language designed for small minds like mine. I keep wanting to know what God’s up to these days, and how those babies fit into the natural order of things.

If I didn’t have a Savior that I loved so deeply, I’d give up entirely. My intimate God is also my omniscient God, and although I can't grasp it, I am left to trust his designs—the singletons, the orphans, the disabled, the ordinaries, and even the eights.