I’ve been reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s prison letters. It is striking, how he integrated a painful realism regarding the depravity of mankind, and in particular the Nazi regime that eventually murdered him, with an optimism that God’s providence, writ in miracles as well as nature, would overcome such evils. “I believe,” he wryly wrote, “that even our mistakes and shortcomings are turned to good account, and that it is no harder for God to deal with them than with our supposedly good deeds.”

Here was a man who was safely abroad, but chose to return to Germany under the conviction that pastors who did not endure with their people would be in no position to lead a restoration once Nazism was defeated. A Christian and therefore peaceful, he nonetheless conspired to kill Hitler. He wrestled with the responsibilities of a Christian man in the face of evil. As I consider my responses — and more grievously, my non-responses — to our present day’s evils, I find Bonhoeffer’s worldview illuminating:

“The ultimate question for a responsible man to ask is not how he is to extricate himself heroically from the affair, but how the coming generation is to live. It is only from this question, with its responsibility towards history, that fruitful solutions can come, even if for the time being they are very humiliating.”

In the end he came to know greater humiliation; on a drizzly day weeks before the war’s end, he was led from his cell, ordered to strip naked, and shot. It is edifying, therefore, to see how Bonhoeffer regarded his persecutors. In his letter titled “After Ten Years,” he wrote something that has convicted me, and subsequently grieved me as I think about how I and many of us in the church sometimes regard sinners:

“We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer. The only profitable relationship to others — and especially to our weaker brethren — is one of love, and that means the will to hold fellowship with them. God himself did not despise humanity, but became man for men’s sake”

I thought of this recently as I saw a car with a window sticker that read: NOTHING FAILS LIKE PRAYER

My instinct was to despise the car’s owner, but I thought about what Bonhoeffer wrote from his prison cell. It occurred to me, then, that perhaps the car’s owner is right. When your worldly options are exhausted, so that you cry to God for release from suffering, or for someone you love to be spared, and this pleading is met with apparent silence, maybe there is no greater sense of abandonment. Maybe there is nothing like a prayer that seems to have failed.

The car’s owner probably didn’t intend for it to be read that way. I pondered what suffering must lead a rational adult to spend time fastening six-inch high letters to his window that shout to God: You weren’t there for me. I considered the pain of suffering strangers and aliens, those who are stricken by the world, yet do not know God. Of course they would slap offensive slogans on their cars and bodies, and spit at the image of Christ, and busy themselves with distraction and self-destruction. Wouldn’t you or I, absent that still, small voice?

So instead of hating the car’s owner, I tried to regard him, as Bonhoeffer urged, in the light of his suffering. And then I prayed for him. Then I prayed thanks to God, for the pleadings answered and the pleadings denied, because in my striving with him he has been there. Even when I thought him absent, he was there. This, more than any immediate answer to my wants, is the blessing to which I cling.