Haiti is devastated. 100,000 people are likely to have perished in a quake that destroyed the entire country and leveled the capitol to a point where it will take years just to get the country back to the mediocre condition many of its poorest people lived in for most of their lives. Amidst this devastation, many are thanking God for his providence in leading their family to safety or for sparing their family altogether, or for not devastating relatives in Haiti.
I don’t get it.
Far be it from me to question someone’s belief in God. I believe, also. Maybe not to the extent people would like me to believe, but I believe. I believe God sets us down on Earth, lets us do our thing, then comes and gets us after a few years when He’s ready, not unlike the way parents pick you up, as a kid, from a friend’s house after a play-date. God is our father, and he picks us up to go home when we’re done playing with our friends here on Earth.
For me, there’s no leap of faith to be made here because I don’t believe that God has a hand in everything that goes on on this little marble we’re spinning through space on. I think he just lets us be and picks us up at the end. We can eff up everything, and we’ll be picked up by the Father when it’s time to go home. For others, however, I can’t imagine what a tortured life it must be to believe that everything that happens and is done for them or for their family is done at the hands of the Lord. If you believe that, and I’m not saying you shouldn’t, you have to reconcile a lot of things that I don’t have to, and you also have to discount what’s staring you right in the face.
For example, if you believe God has a hand in everything, you have to therefore believe the earthquake was caused by Him and to believe that, you’d have to believe he did it for a reason. You would also have to suspend disbelief that God would harm innocent people for no reason, and trod upon the already-suffering masses in a country that’s had more sadness than most others in the world. You’d essentially have to believe that your God, for no apparent reason, decided to smite a country with a natural disaster. What’s that, you say? I don’t understand?
Well, actually I do, because on top of believing that, if you believe God has a hand in everything, you’d also have to believe that God didn’t save thousands of people from torturous deaths in Haiti, but helped you graduate college, get a job promotion, or helped P. Diddy win a Grammy. In fact, we know he helped the Yankees win the World Series, and he helped numerous R&B singers win AMA’s, Grammy’s, and MTV VMA’s because, as they remind us when they win, they’d like to “thank God.”
That this leaves us in, at the very least, a contradictory position, is obvious. In order to believe God tinkers with our daily lives, we have to accept the fact that He destroyed a tropical nation of impoverished people, while at the same time gave Soulja Boy mad stacks on deck, lotsa hunnys, and so on. Does that even make sense to anyone?
Oh right, it’s not supposed to make sense because we take it on faith that giving Soulja Boy a leg up and destroying a country are the same thing. We’re supposed to take it on faith that God works in ways we don’t understand. In fact, arguments like this are usually cut off with such compelling thoughts as “because He can,” or “that’s why it’s called faith,” and in the end both of those say one of two things to me: we don’t have an answer, or we do and it’s not convenient to our beliefs so we just ignore it.
I have the answer. God is out there. Watching. Paying attention. He sees what we do. He pays attention. He takes notes. But in the end, he’s an observer. What happens to us is up to us, not up to Him. He doesn’t give people awards, sports championships, or help them graduate college. He doesn’t give people healthy babies, bigger houses, faster cars, more money, or a better sex life. The next time you see some dope on television (or anywhere, for that matter) telling you how great God is because God turned their life around and took their dumb pothead knocked up ass and helped them graduate college and get a happy family, just ask them about the thousands of people who God, by their definition, let slip who worked hard, were good people, and didn’t make it.
God doesn’t intervene because if he did, there are a lot of people who could’ve been spared some insanely tragic circumstances in their lives.
That’s just the way it is.
