Better

If you're a person who believes in some sort of personal Divine Being, do you ever play this little head game? Something disappointing happens, and either someone says, "Well, God must have a better plan," or you think something like, "God is sovereign and things happen for a purpose, so clearly I'm supposed to learn something from this, or He knew something bad was going to happen if my wishes were fulfilled, so it's all for the best." Then you sit around mulling this over for way too long and trying to envision all the scenarios that you might have been spared from, or trying to figure out what it is you're supposed to be learning.

Here's an example:

I was supposed to fly to Brother-Dave and Sister-in-Lu's yesterday. I was going to use up my last week of vacation for the year during the last week of the year playing with TWCN and Smiley-Guy. But I live in a usually-cold, wintery northern state, and Brother-Dave's family lives in a pretty far away cold, wintery northern state. My northern state had been a little tardy as far as snowfall and winter weather, in comparison to Ireland, where my parents live, which isn't even supposed to get snow, and was having a blizzard along with the rest of Europe the day my parents were scheduled to fly over here. Closed European airports notwithstanding, my parents actually got on a plane, which actually left, and actually arrived safely in our cold northern state that hadn't had any snow yet.

You would think if it had waited this long to snow, it could've waited a little longer, until the winter festivities were over or something. But it didn't. We managed not to get a white Christmas (snow on Christmas is, of course, totally irrelevant to the holiday, but it sure makes for a lovely landscape), but the day after, we began to get a blizzard. In this neck of the woods, it doesn't even seem like it was that bad, overall. But the timing was miserable, and the short version of the story is that I am now not going to Minnesota to see my brother and his family, and my parents, who were supposed to leave today, now have to wait to fly out there until Friday, and are still working on extending their stay, re-hiring a rental car, and getting back to the house here in the meantime.

This is when someone comes along and helpfully says, "Well, God has a better plan." This is probably true, but it sure doesn't seem like it from this vantage point. There's no use in pretending that any of this is of earth-shaking importance, but if it's important enough for God to have another plan than it, it must be important enough to get kind of a reaction from the people affected. The reaction, at least from me, is that being stranded at home on vacation with nothing to do (but church history paper research, which I can't do much of anyway, because the seminary offices are closed and it's hard to find info on the Protestant modernist-fundamentalist controversy anywhere else in this heavily Roman Catholic part of the world), as contrasted with playing tea party for a week with TWCN is a weird kind of "better." I'd debate it.

Then today I woke up with a cough, which has now established itself firmly in my lungs. So--maybe it's "better" that I was prevented from going because Brother-Dave's family spent pretty much the entire time at Sister-in-Lu's parents' house over Christmas, sick as dogs. Surely they do not need to get sick again, even if it's a completely different type of ailment. But really? Wouldn't it have been simpler just to keep me from getting sick?

Maybe God's trying to grow my character, and maybe it's even working, because in spite of this rant, I'm not actually angry, as I might have been in the past--just a little put out and kind of cynical/curious about reasons. Or maybe He's trying to grow my brother's character, by giving him surely one of the most miserable Christmas/New Year's seasons he's ever had. Or maybe He's trying to show two-and-a-half-year-old TWCN that life's just not fair and the sooner she learns it the better: apparently she cried when she found out I couldn't come to visit her. I wonder how she'll take the delay in my parents' itinerary.

Well, it isn't fair. None of this is the biggest deal ever, but it's disappointing and frustrating and disrupting and . . . not fair.

On the other hand . . . This is the kind of thing that leads some people to decide there is no God, or He doesn't love us, or He isn't all-powerful, and that, to me, seems like overkill. If there is a God, it makes sense that He might not make sense. I mean, made in the image of God we may be. God Himself, we are not (in spite of worldviews that try to tell us differently). In the first place, who am I to think any of this should matter to Him, really? And if, as I believe, it surprisingly does, does that mean He's going to step in at every moment, insuring that everything about my life is smooth sailing? (Evidently not . . . because it hasn't been!) I'm not writing this to prove anything. (Fortunately, since I'm not succeeding in that.) I'm just mulling this over. And here's what I'm thinking:

Maybe somehow, in some miraculous, sparkly-snowflake, cheesy Serendipity-movie kind of way, I'll meet this amazing guy this week and be married by next Christmas or something crazy like that, or maybe I'll just be stuck here with a chest-cold and no little-girl tea-parties. But either way, I still believe God is good, and God loves me, and God is all-powerful. I just don't think any of that requires Him to wait on me hand-and-foot, or forestall any disappointments, and I don't even think there has to be a "reason," or a "better," honestly. At least, not one that I'll necessarily ever see. The world is broken, and "broken" things happen here.

We celebrate God's coming into the brokenness at this time of year. He came ultimately to fix it--to fix us--but first He submitted to the brokenness and darkness, the disappointment and frustration and disruption (do I think His leaving Heaven to hang out down here with us wasn't a disruption?), and even now we're waiting for the final "fixing." It'll come. I hope I learn something from this, even if I'm not married by next Christmas, but maybe it's all just part of living here, and maybe, with God around, even if He isn't fixing it right now, that's okay.

Speaking of Heresy

My "new" car is fantastic. I am so happy with it. The only things wrong with it are that I have no (working) way to plug my ipod into the sound system, and . . . it has a tiny, well-nigh tasteful, American flag sticker in the lower left hand corner of the rear window.

That's the heretical part of course--that having an American flag sticker stuck on my car would be "wrong." I don't know. I guess I just spent too long in the down-and-out East End of London to be comfortable with iconography that identifies me with one specific ethnic group or nation. Ever since my uncle came out with the album and song "Citizen of Heaven" (what? you've never heard of it? yeah . . . it was kind of like my book: worth it, but obscure) and I realised that was an actual Bible verse, I have had a little trouble being patriotic. (Either that or it gave me an excuse not to be.) Yes, I am an American, and I appreciate the freedoms that I have, and I daresay I take many of them for granted. I just have a little trouble wanting that to be my identity--the thing I'm known for.

When I was a little kid, living in Honduras, I thought the USA was Heaven. After all, we had to fly to get there. Through clouds and everything! Plus, everyone spoke English (i.e., I could understand them) and we could drink water directly from the taps instead of having to boil it first. After we moved back here, however, my attitude started slowly but surely to shift. I guess that happens when you've been exposed to another culture at an early age--even if you spend that early age trying to resist it (stupidly, I refused to learn Spanish). You just realise that there are other people out there and other ways of doing things, and while you may still prefer your way, the lines dividing cultures and nationalities get to feeling really arbitrary and frustrating. At least they did to me.

I've been reading Jeremiah lately. That book is fascinating to me, in part because Jeremiah was so faithful to God, and God was so faithful to him, but he ended up feeling disappointed with how God was demonstrating His faithfulness a lot of the time. Sometimes he just wished God would leave him alone--that he didn't have these words burning a hole in his heart and his tongue that he just had to speak but which got him in heaps (or cisterns) of trouble every time he opened his mouth. I haven't hung out in a cistern lately, and hope not to . . . ever, but there are still some things about this guy that I resonate with, I guess.

The other thing I find fascinating, though, is his message. Here he is, going to the priests and prophets and leaders of a country whose claim to identity was having been hand-chosen by God. They are telling the people, "God's not going to abandon us. Look--His Temple's here. That's His house. He won't let anything happen to that--or to us, either. We are the people of God." And Jeremiah's saying back, "Um, guys? Stop hiding behind this Temple and these religious practices, okay? God knows you haven't really been worshiping Him in a while now--all these idols and stuff instead--and He's getting ready to send in the Babylonians to take you all away for a good long time."

("No He isn't"--"Yes He is"--"No He isn't" . . . )

"So here's what you have to do. You've got to cooperate with the foreign army. Let them in, abide by their laws, go where they tell you, and seek their good, and you'll be spared. If you resist? It's not going to turn out so great for you."

Somehow, the people didn't like this message all that much. And I think I understand why not. For one thing, it sounds heretical. Here they are, the people of God, being told to capitulate to a bunch of heathens. (Never mind that they've been worshiping idols in tandem with God for a long time now.) To make matters worse, the guy that's telling them this is saying that God is telling them to do this. It's another one of those, "God wouldn't say that," moments, like "Go marry a prostitute" (Hosea) and "I'm going to form a child in your womb so it looks like you got pregnant out of wedlock in a culture where that's not okay--okay?" (Mary). Sometimes God asks us to do stuff which is according to His plan, His wisdom, His goodness . . . but it doesn't sound Biblical, if you will.

This message of Jeremiah sounded treasonous--well it was treasonous--and the assumption was that treason against the nation was treason against God, but the fact was, it wasn't. The nation had run away from God a long time ago, and the only way to get any of them back was to send them away for a while and stoke up the fires of repentance and true faith and God-seeking and character-building that God wanted.

I got to thinking about this. I got to imagining modern-day equivalents. I thought about how there are plenty of people in this country who don't believe in God, or believe in different gods, or are open about not caring less whether there is a God or not. But there are also a lot of people in this country who do believe in God and for better or worse are convinced this country once was a Christian nation and that it needs to become so again. I started imagining what would happen if some Christian somewhere began telling everyone that, say, extremist Muslims were going to take over the USA, and that we should let them. It doesn't just sound like we're giving up our national freedoms (which some people seem to equate with, like, the fruits of the Spirit or something anyway). It sounds like we're capitulating to the spiritual enemy. It sounds like by that very action we'd be denying our faith in Christ. Doesn't it?

I'm not saying that's what's going to happen. I'm not Jeremiah. As far as I know, God did not wake me up this morning to tell my occasional blog-readers to get ready for a terrorist influx by giving into it. (And I should probably also say, for any Muslim friends of mine who might be reading this, I am not tarring all Muslims with the same brush, but I think we both know there are people of that faith who want to take over the world by shari'a law, and that such a law does not exactly grant equal treatment to people of other faiths. Certainly such impulses exist within aspects of "Christianity" and Buddhism and Hinduism, too, but extremist Muslims seem to me a little more global with theirs at the moment.)

What I think I am saying is, I think it's easy to mix up nationality and national rights and privileges with Christianity, and I don't think they're the same thing. And while fighting for universal rights and freedoms is likely a good thing, I don't think they, as political constructs and national benefits, are as important to God as they are to us or as we think they are to Him. And sometimes I wonder, if there were to come another Jeremiah, whether we'd think he wasn't the anti-Christ and throw him in a well or something.

Beyond Settling

So really. How do you know when you're supposed to be content with something, seize the opportunity available instead of the one you might have wanted, and take things as they come, versus when you're supposed to hold out for something better? How do you know the difference between contentment, resignation, and settling? I've asked these kinds of questions before. Here's a new context for them.

You may have noticed that I keep obliquely mentioning I need to replace my car. Bela Corolla, serviceable as he has been, is rather ailing these days. Even though three years ago he got all new brakes, new tires, a new battery and a new starter, and even though last year he got his wheels re-applied (when they almost fell off) and a couple of other things, this year he's burning oil so that I have to put at least a quart in every week, I can't see how fast I'm going at night (due to all the interior lights having died), and the struts are shot. The car basically clunks along, no matter how smooth the road surface . . . and in Central Massachusetts the road surface is not always very smooth (regardless of ongoing attempts to fix this). There are also more minor cosmetic issues, like the fact that when a droplet of water hits a fabric surface in the car, it spreads to an unremovable stain 1000 times its size. And the fact that one of the lights on the passenger's side is taped on with packing tape.

Car-Shop-Dave, from my church, has been helping me in my quest for a replacement vehicle, and the other day when they were moving cars around at his dealership, he discovered a 2005 Nissan Altima with only 52,000 miles and an excellent Carfax, that he thought would be just what I was looking for. Even though they want to sell it to me for $1000 more than the maximum price I was willing to pay (since I am not entirely sure I have the money for this venture to begin with), yesterday I went in to look at the car.

As soon as I sat in it, I uttered an involuntary sigh, and thought to myself, "I had no idea my car was so uncomfortable!" Car-Shop-Dave and his car shop let me take it home for the night so I could have my mechanics check it out this morning, and naturally, the more I drove it, the more I loved it. But . . . it is still $1000 more than I was willing to pay for it. And . . . I discovered that Bela's trade-in value is only $1000. Not only are all those things wrong that I mentioned before, but I'm sure my Corolla's Carfax tells all and sundry that one particularly rough year, I crashed him. Twice.

There are people who would say God doesn't care about my car needs, mundane as they are, and I'm not one who subscribes to "prosperity gospel." (I find it kind of horrifying, honestly.) However, I do believe He cares about the details of our lives, and I also believe He is able to do, as the Bible says a few times "more than we ask or imagine." I have a pretty good imagination, so that's saying something.

So let's say I had this pipe dream of an expressly environmentally-friendly, safe car which I could somehow get for under $10,000, at payments of only $200 a month. Unlikely, but God can do anything, right? So . . . do I hold out for this? Or, when the opportunity arises to get a car with an excellent reputation and history, which is more comfortable and more spacious than I could have hoped for, but which costs slightly more than I had wanted, and when my car's trade-in value is less than I'd hoped for (though honestly probably better than I should've expected), and they tell me I can make payments of $202 per month, do I take it? Does $202 count as "more than $200 a month"? Or is this some kind of divine dig-in-the-ribs, where God's saying, "Oh no, darling--you don't get out of making an actual decision that easily." (Interestingly, today I saw a car with a license plate saying "UDCIDE." It felt a little more personal than the last one. Who are these people?) Another factor is that the dealership's interest rate isn't that good for financing, but my bank that could give me a better one apparently doesn't deal with them. On the other hand, the car's so good that if I don't decide to buy it by tomorrow at 2 p.m., the dealership owner wants it.

So really. What am I supposed to do? I'm asking. This car's pretty great. I want it. I do. But it's kind of none of the things I asked or imagined. Does this mean I'm settling, or that it's more than I asked or imagined? It doesn't feel like more. It just feels like different.

I have less than 24 hours to figure this out.

Look at the Birds of the Air

A few evenings ago I had supper with Mentor-Liz. Then we had ice cream. (Note: "cherry-vanilla" ice cream is nothing like the black cherry ice creams I like, such as Ben and Jerry's "Cherry Garcia.") Then we went for a walk. It was a short walk, but it was long enough for us to see a bluebird.

By which I mean, a real live, in-the-wild bluebird. It was sitting at the top of a chain link fence, and it stayed there for quite some time, undoubtedly so we could admire its beautiful blue plumage and red breast.

Back when I was really really little (like, probably too young for anyone to believe I could remember any of it) I thought I saw a bluebird once, but when I talked about it to anyone as a slightly older child, everyone told me that was impossible because they were extinct. They told me I imagined it. I very well may have, but the fact is that bluebirds are not, after all, extinct, even though people thought so for a while, and the other fact is that I really did see one, finally in real life and not just in pictures, and all of three nights ago.

Birds have always kind of seemed to me like messages from God. Not messengers, but messages. The messages are never verbal (Obviously. They're ornithological), so it's always kind of hard to explain what I feel God is saying through them. Maybe sometimes He's not saying anything. Maybe He's just showing me something He made that He thinks I will enjoy. I think He does that sometimes. It's just that the showing always comes with a little extra sense of His presence. This has happened to me with cardinals, chickadees, swans and parrots (yes--parrots living in the wild in Connecticut--I'm not kidding, or making it up). This time it happened with a bluebird.

I didn't think about this until I started writing this post, but sometimes there are things that you know exist, that you know can happen, that you're even pretty sure you've seen before . . . but maybe you've just read about them in books. And everyone says, "You've seen that happen? That doesn't happen anymore. You've just imagined it."

But maybe you haven't. Maybe that thing is just waiting in hiding, like a legend or a myth or an extinction, waiting to come out at sit on a chain link fence where you can finally see it and admire it's plumage and say, "Ah! I knew you were real!"

The Difference

Last Saturday was positively glorious, such that even though I have a distinctly lazy streak, I decided to get out for a walk. I didn’t even need a jacket. I walked down the usual route, because there is very little else to do but walk the usual route unless you want to go down it backwards, and presently I came upon the House on the Corner.

The House on the Corner has little stone fairies in the rocks along the side of the road and on Saturday an older couple was raking the leaves out of the rocks. By the time I got there, the wife had gone inside, and it was just the husband out there raking. I said hello. He said hello. We both remarked approvingly on the weather. I kept walking.

I had gone quite some way down the road when the nagging voice in my head that was telling me to go and offer to help him rake got the better of me, and so I turned around and walked back. I had a conversation in my head where the man gratefully accepted my help (even though he’s a New Englander--I should have thought that one out a little more) and then I said something trite but heartfelt and true about Jesus loving him.

At least I know enough by now to be fairly certain that the conversations I have in my head will not remotely resemble the ones that happen in real life. This one didn’t.

It started all right. I offered to help. He declined. I asked if he was sure. He was. Then he leaned on his rake and started talking. He began by talking about his grandkids, but what ended up happening was a full-on “evangelistic” promotion of paganism. He was lucky, he said, that he had had the upbringing he did. His mother was very sensitive, he said. He grew up with ghosts and learned not to be afraid of them. He had experiences, which he told me about. One of them involved going “back and back” past his Egyptian period and discovering he was holding a galaxy in his hands and singing a love-song lullaby to it.

The thing he had learned, he told me, was that everything is interconnected, and every moment is to be enjoyed and that we are pre-existently eternal, and more powerful than we can even know. “There are some Entities,” he said, confidentially, “who don’t want us to know how powerful we are.” I felt him looking at me pointedly. I was fairly certain he had figured out I was a Christian, even though I had said approximately nothing in the entire half hour he was talking to me. I thought he was implying that the Entity that Christians worship as God was one such being, set on keeping us down.

I wanted to argue, but I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that it wouldn’t do any good. I wanted to say, “Yep. We are more powerful than we have any idea of. It wouldn’t surprise me if one day we were to hold galaxies in our hands [actually, that’s not true--the act itself might be surprising when it actually happens], but we don’t get that from ourselves. We get it because we are made in the image of the Lord God Almighty who doesn’t want to keep us down--He wants us to reign with Him. But there are entities who don’t want us to reach our potential, and those are the lying spirits you’re listening to, who fill your head with delusions of independence, spinning out the deception until the end, all the while keeping you away from the One who loves you and can enable you to be more than you ever thought.”

I thought if I tried to say something like that, first off he wouldn’t allow me to get that many words in edgewise, and secondly it would degenerate into a “my God is better than your god” (or whatever) argument, and, on the level of argument he would probably win. I daresay he has seen more supernatural or at least paranormal experiences than I have.

But I couldn’t stop wondering how one does engage in a real give-and-take about beliefs with someone who believes like this. There’s a man at Old Church who talks about Jesus and the difference He’s made in his life in just the same way this man, Pagan-Jerry, was talking about his special spirits. I knew from the bottom of my soul there was a difference, but I couldn’t find a way to helpfully articulate it.

The weird thing was that I had just been thinking that morning, for some unknown reason, about how CS Lewis and JRR Tolkein engaged paganism in their stories and made use of the similarities with the Christian story to show how Jesus fulfilled not only the prophecies of Judaism but the dreams of paganism. But right then, talking to Pagan-Jerry, the similarities seemed like the biggest stumbling-block of all. How could I refute anything he said when to do so would sound like I was just changing the labels around?

I kept asking Jesus to give me some words, but He didn't, that I could tell, so I just listened. And then Pagan-Jerry said, “It’s just such a shame we don’t realise all this about ourselves. We do such atrocious things to each other and to our world. Some that I’ve talked to [here he looked significantly at me, giving me to understand he meant some spirits, and not some other humans] keep asking, ‘What’s wrong with all of you? You destroy each other. You foul your nest. Why do you do it?’ And I just don’t know. That's just how it is.”

That was when I realised the difference. The pagan stories have no true place for sin. There’s no explanation of it--how it got here, why we do it, why the world is in the mess it is today. Ironically, the one story that calls sin “sin” and whose Hero definitively triumphed over it and eradicates it is the one story that also has a place for it. Only the long slow multi-millennial process of the story of Jesus can give us a reason for why we destroy each other and foul the world we live in. And only that story can give us an ultimate solution.

As if proving the point--that I sin--I took my own personal safety and composure in my hands at that point, and returned home.

What's a Miracle, Vincent?

Last night I watched Pulp Fiction for the first time ever.

There are reasons that I would not recommend this to . . . maybe anyone, although that might be hypocritical, since I seem to be glad I watched it. Maybe because the (admittedly obscenity-, profanity-, and potentially violence-laden--like the rest of the movie) scene at the very end is surprisingly redemptive. There's even a Christ-allusion, though the character through which it comes has been anything but Christlike for the better part of the film.

The lead-in to the scene is this rather intriguing dialogue (stolen from Wikiquote and slightly censored by me):

Jules: Man, I just been sitting here thinking.

Vincent: About what?

Jules: About the miracle we just witnessed.

Vincent: The miracle you witnessed. I witnessed a freak occurrence.

Jules: What is a miracle, Vincent?

Vincent: An act of God.

Jules: And what's an act of God?

Vincent: When, um … God makes the impossible possible … but this morning I don't think qualifies.

Jules: Hey, Vincent, don't you see? That s*** don't matter. You're judging this s*** the wrong way. I mean, it could be that God stopped the bullets, or He changed Coke to Pepsi, He found my f****** car keys. You don't judge s*** like this based on merit. Now, whether or not what we experienced was an "according to Hoyle" miracle is insignificant. What is significant is that I felt the touch of God. God got involved.

Vincent: But why?

Jules: Well, that's what's f****** with me. I don't know why, but I can't go back to sleep.

I'm intrigued by the philosophical dimensions of this dialogue. (The fact that it is, believe it or not, one of the less obscene ones in the film is not unsignificant either.) For one thing, the idea that you "don't judge [a purported miracle] based on merit" seems to me to be similar to what we talked about that time we were talking about taking God shopping.

But I'm also curious about defining a miracle by the receptivity of the person experiencing it. In the case of Jules and Vincent, both experienced the exact same event--in which neither of them died though they should have ("should," both according to laws of morality and probability). But Vincent thought they got lucky, and Jules thought God was reaching into his life to redirect him.

So who was right? I know this is just, well, Fiction, and everything, but it could happen in real life, and if it did, is the miracle the event that kept both men from being riddled with bullets, even though Vincent was "spiritually blind" enough not to see it? Or was the real miracle that Jules was able to see God's hand in the situation? It's kind of a postmodernist "the reader is always right" sort of approach to things, but I'm not sure that's entirely faulty here.

It's also kind of like the "If a tree falls in the woods" conundrum. Are there inherently miraculous events which only have merit if someone manages to acknowledge it? Or are there only events, whether specifically God-ordained or ones that happen that He simply works through, such that the real miracle is always when a person responds? We love because He first loved us, and are any of us capable of responding without His nudge?

Iron Sharpens Iron

Here's an idea to keep you honest:

Make a really close friend whose worldview is totally opposed to your own and who isn't afraid to say so, and with whom you aren't afraid to disagree either.

I don't know that it's possible to go out and intentionally do this, but I would just say that if you find yourself in this position, you might want to consider thanking God for it and learning from Him in it, instead of running away from it like I tried to do that time (and sometimes keep trying to do). Particularly if you have been intentional about finding people who do share your worldview and can make sure you're not running off the rails somewhere.

The Milk Guy's really good at calling my bluff. I don't get to start sounding all super-spiritual without having to think about what I'm saying, and if I really mean it, and if I even begin to live up to it. And every once in a while he'll come up with a zinger of a theological insight that will set me on my heels.

This week has, as I keep mentioning, been a little rough for me, and actually the weeks leading up to it haven't been exactly stress-free, either, as we at Starbucks scramble to get enough work hours to support ourselves, for example. This kind of scenario makes me grumpy and weepy and I start making up new rude words out of existing rude words and find, to my chagrin, that I am kind of delighted with them because they are clever, even if thoroughly inappropriate for a Christian. (The Milk Guy doesn't help with that so much, because he thinks they're clever, too, and has no such scruples.)

The thing about all that is that though it doesn't make me look--or feel--very good, I don't get to make excuses for myself, like I might if I were going to go to a prayer meeting that night and rehash the day in Evangelese to my friends. The Milk Guy sees my moods and reactions in all their un-glory, and there's no explaining away with him.

It's kind of a lot of pressure. And sometimes I feel like I'm making a complete hash of reflecting Christ to anybody, let alone him. (And . . . I probably am.) But he doesn't let me wallow in "I'm such a horrible Christian" mode either. Recently I said, "I feel like God's trying to communicate with you . . . but He sure could have picked a whole lot better representative . . ."

The Milk Guy paused (understandably, as I think about it), and then said, "Aren't you kind of making yourself out to be more powerful than God when you say that?"

Oh. Right. And so we keep talking. And so he challenges me and I appreciate that, and I remember from time to time that not only am I not the perfect representative of Christ on earth, but that I don't have to be--because, as the Milk Guy himself reminded me whether he meant to or not, God is God and He'll cause whatever transformations He sees fit. Including in me.

Why Do We Do This, Again?

The Milk Guy says that if there's a God, He must be a cosmic Sadist.

I never really know how to respond to this when he brings it up, because frankly, sometimes I think things like that myself, and so I have no idea how to explain how Christians (generally) view trials, without sounding like we have made ourselves into Masochists-for-the-God.

Here are some cases in point:

1. Pretty much all the Old Testament prophecies. God's people are not cooperating with Him. He gets mad. He causes or allows (depending on your theology--but the words in the Bible usually sound like "causes") really horrific things to happen to them. Today I read in Zechariah 14.2 (NRSV) "For I will gather all the nations against Jerusalem to battle, and the city shall be taken and the houses looted and the women raped . . . " It actually goes on from there, but the rape thing alone causes me to recoil so violently, I kind of lost track of the rest of it. He mercifully allows some people to be spared these monstrosities, and then He restores them, and they're supposed to (and do, at least for a time) return to Him with love in their hearts because He essentially beat the stuffing out of them. Or . . . that's what it reads like.

2. I'm reading an autobiography of an English evangelist, whose prayer as a child was that she could get into the center of God's heart. Or something like that. She had a fairly difficult childhood and then suffered some serious health issues (and miracles) as an adult, and at the end of the second-to-last chapter, she renewed her request to God that she be satisfied with only Him. Three weeks later, her husband of 30 years, who had been involved in ministry with her, left her for another woman. What?!

3. I've prayed similar prayers, and meant them, and I've even asked God to do whatever it takes (even to me) to cause certain people to come to know Him. Now I have cancer? I don't know if that's "what it takes," but I do know there's some way that this is supposed to draw me closer to Him.

Don't get me wrong. I love the Old Testament prophets (although I've decided I don't like Zechariah all that much), and I think the prayer for God and God alone is probably the best one we can pray. (It's also pretty audacious, if you think about it, and so the fact that we can pray it is pretty amazing.) I love that God wants to relate to us enough to open Himself up to our rage--to the point of His own death in Jesus. I know (at least intellectually, although sometimes that's all it feels like) that He doesn't ask us to do anything He didn't live through Himself, or experience along with us. I've sensed His presence with me in this cancer adventure and I've seen Him answer prayers in surprising ways and I know He's been faithful to me through my whole life.

I also understand that if He tried to coax us to Him with blessings all the time, it wouldn't work. We just get distracted. All right, I get distracted, okay? I get all caught up in the blessing and start to treat it, instead of Him, like God.

I'm just saying that causing or allowing the rape of the people He chose when He hates rape, or answering Jennifer Rees Larcombe's prayer through a divorce when He hates divorce, is downright baffling, and I don't really know how to argue with the Milk Guy when he says, "You talk like everything God does is perfect. But He makes bad stuff happen, too. You have to take the good with the bad."

"As for God, His way is perfect," but I do see the Milk Guy's point. For all I said about "It's all good," God's perfect way often feels really bad. And even if I am settled in myself that I have about as complicated a relationship with God as I do with the Milk Guy but that it's good; even when I feel that I can trust in God when I suspect He might hurt me and that I love Him even when He does; even when I know that I am free (thanks to Jesus) to argue with God and that somehow through all this turmoil it will bring me closer to Him, I really don't know how to explain that to anybody without its sounding like I have some kind of psychological malfunction that causes me to seek out pain. I don't. I really don't like pain.

So . . . why do we do this, again?

Allegory

I have a confession to make.

A couple, actually. The first one is that I am strongly considering changing the name of this blog to "I have a confession to make." That seems to be what it's about, most of the time. Thank you, Confessors. Sorry about that.

The one I started being about to make is this:

I like allegories.

Shhh! I know! That is sooo not cool of me!

Allegories are stories-non-grata in the literary world (and most other worlds, too). They're usually not very good literature. The whole point-by-point symbolism tends to grate on most people, and nobody likes moralising. I totally get it. It's just that . . . sometimes it's kind of a relief or something not to have to do the work of figuring things out. Sometimes it's kind of nice to have a prepackaged spiritual truth, pretty much spelled out, but with different pictures, as it were. When I encounter one, if I like the "pictures," I feel kind of validated. Or, if the beliefs being spelled out aren't the same as mine, I feel like at least I know what they are so I can consider them without being force-fed philosophy (which, for some reason, I always have a harder time processing).

Since I secretly like it, I also (sometimes less secretly) look for it everywhere. In books I read. In every day life. In my defense, though, unless I'm feeling even lazier than usual, looking for allegories can kind of be heady work in itself. And it turns out that the allegories I prefer are more often the ones that aren't intentional, or that don't translate exactly point-by-point after all. Maybe kind of like . . . a parable. Hey! Jesus used parables . . . !

I bring this up because I've been allegorising and analogising lately, and some of that is probably going to spill over into the Confessional pretty soon.