Is God a nice-oholic? There’s an interesting question. I think everyone at some point has at least wanted God to be a nice-oholic: “God, I have this thing I really want… You’re going to give it to me right? You say You love me, so You have to… don’t You?” Unfortunately, it’s easy to forget that love doesn’t mean being submissive. Love actually means having to say no once in awhile. I’ve been a Christian a very long time and I’ve been blessed to have a Masters of Theology while also gleaning some really great wisdom and if I’m honest, there are still times I want God to be like a cosmic Santa Claus who will give me what I want because I’ve been nice. Sure, naughty people shouldn’t be rewarded. You should have to earn an answered prayer, right? But that’s not how it works. The problem is when you desperately want something you want there to be something you can do to get God to do your will: “Maybe if I fast for awhile that will make my prayers get answered.” Unfortunately, that’s the opposite of what’s supposed to happen because it’s supposed to be about God’s will… but that can leave us feeling helpless: “So I just have to wait and hope that my prayer can fall under His will? That sucks!” For instance, I’m currently 25 months into an addition that was supposed to be four months. My wife and I are killing it… if our goal was to drag this out as long as possible. Last year I even wrote several lessons where I was left questioning if God really cares about us and our first world problems: (God being sarcastic) “Oooh, are you upset that this incredible blessing isn’t working the way you want it? I feel sooooo sorry for you. Let me ignore these people begging me to save their family’s lives in order to help you find a better contractor.” Last year was the worst year of my life because of how there was a constant erosion of my soul, especially since almost every person I looked to for help ended up screwing me over. I even had a guy at church completely unprompted say, “God put it on my heart to help you.” He came and did one day at my house and pretty much disappeared. Another retired contractor from the church offered to help and after three months of promising to show, he unapologetically bailed on the offer. What do you do with that? Is there no one I can trust? It’s been hard for me not to look to God, and ask, “Why didn’t You protect me in some way? I was praying for discernment and on top of these two people I ended up firing nine others and now settling for a worker who averages nine hours a week because at least he’s honest with his hours and he does very good work.” With this experience, there’s been a continual begging and pleading to God for help, and what happened? It got worse – that’s been great. On top of the addition, all of the external issues on their own seemed worse than usual, so it’s been a double hit. Last month, after being put in a position to fix our minivan for $7000 and being told with all that work being done it’d be good for three to five years, on Saturday I was returning from a conference and over 200km away from home the “check engine” light came on and the car was shaking so much I had to pull over and be towed home. That wasn’t even 3-5 weeks since the repairs – good times. The crazy part of this story is I’m still doing better now than last year. It was that rough.
The one highlight I had last year was an older gentleman who plays Santa at Christmas because of his magnificent beard and twinkles in his eyes, shared some very strong wisdom. After he asked how I was and I replied, “It’s been a rough year, but how can I complain when you recently lost your wife.” His reply was incredibly kind: “It’s often the little things that build up to cause more pain because when someone like me loses a loved one, the amount of support is incredible. What kind of support does someone facing a lot of little things receive?” He was right. I wasn’t receiving any real support because the little things I was facing didn’t even give me a good story. Even if someone wanted to offer support, what can they do? It’s like death by a 1000 cuts versus being stabbed. All I was left with was to second guess myself for whether I was making a bigger deal out of nothing. Nothing like personal mind games to go with the pain. Fortunately, I now accept that no matter how many thankful exercises I could have done, I still felt betrayed by humanity because I was – I was betrayed by the workers and the city (there’s a reason Hamilton has a reputation for being a terrible city to build in). Now, my feeling that God betrayed me and set me up to be attacked by the devil was probably a twist of the truth, but I believe there was a target on my family and for some reason no matter how much we prayed (and begged), it didn’t seem to make a difference.
I’ve recently started re-reading Letters from a Skeptic, by Gregory Boyd. When I was 18 it changed my life because it helped me choose to be a Christian on my own outside of my parents. (I highly recommend this book to anyone curious about faith.) What’s funny is when I read it at 18 I was like: “One day I’m going to be that smart,” and now that I’m older, I’m reading it like, “Huhn, I’m never going to be that smart.” One of the downsides of being older is you don’t have dreams of what being older will be like – you’re living it. This is pretty much as good as it gets – fun.
At one point, Boyd gives a really great analogy to explain why God doesn’t give us everything we want. He compared God to an army commander who is responsible for leading his soldiers in a large battle. At some point his two sons get injured and they take shelter in a cabin in the middle of the battlefield. They end up being trapped there, but they have radios to communicate with their dad, the commander. Because of the bigger battle going on, their dad can only answer some of their requests and only at certain times. He can’t give them everything they want or even need because He has a greater responsibility than just to give his sons everything they ask. Sure, someone might say this analogy doesn’t make sense because God is supposed to be all-powerful, but God has created an existence that requires Him to follow rules in order to keep the integrity of His creation. When God made the world, He made it so He would have limited involvement. Well, that’s not entirely true. If you believe Genesis, in His original creation, it says He walked with Adam, but because of Adam’s sin, God was indirectly punished because He could no longer walk with Adam as He once had. God’s ability to connect and help was reduced, which means prayers can’t always be answered – even some of the ones that would make sense to us.
Going back to the original question: Is God a nice-oholic? I essentially answered that question in my last lesson when I claimed that God uses shame as a tool to help people not do stupid things because fear of it as a repercussion can be very powerful. God’s definitely not a pushover. He’s not afraid of letting us struggle, especially since it’s struggle that can make us stronger and have better character. In the wisdom book of the Bible it regularly teaches that the wise love correction: “To learn, you must love discipline; it is stupid to hate correction.” (Pro 12:1) It even goes so far as to claim: “Those who spare the rod of discipline hate their children. Those who love their children care enough to discipline them.” (Pro 13:24) Of course, the spirit of this verse isn’t that we should use weapons on our children, but we need to find what’s appropriate for disciplining them. Since God is said to be our Father, loving us means He has to discipline us, which means He’s not a nice-oholic. Of course, I’m not sure where the line is between God’s discipline, people just sucking and we face the repercussions of that, and the devil using us as target practice. I guess the positive minded person would argue regardless of the source, it can be made into being like God’s discipline and even a blessing if we find the lesson and good in what we face.
This week may you consider what it means if God is not a nice-oholic.
Rev. Chad David, ChadDavid.ca, learning to love dumb people (like me)
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