What if God has limits?
Two people that mattered to me died this week. One, I knew and loved and was personally shaped by being a spectator to they way he lived his life; the other was an author, a female theologian who shaped my doubts and thoughts and indirectly gave me permission to struggle through my faith.
Both died of disease because their bodies turned against them. Both died too early. The former at 57 and the latter at 37.
I am familiar with the theology that explains evil exists in this world because people have free will and sometimes harm is caused because of the choices of others. For example, I understand that God saving the victim killed in a drunk driving accident might be tricky because free will allows the other individaul his choice to drink and drive. The movie Bruce Almighty plays this type of theology out on a large scale. It shows how humans are connected and God intervening and changing the course for one life has ripple effects that may change the course for all. I get that to an extent.
But that theology falls short for me when it comes to diseases. Why couldn't God just heal? Why couldn't he intervene? Doing so would have impacted no one else's free will.
In my life, I am surrounded by a lot of brokenness. I am an Occupational Therapist and work with people with disabilities and disease. For the past 1 1/2 years, I've worked with adults and the elderly, not at a clinic, but in their homes. It's different being in their homes. You see more. Instead of greeting a fully-dressed-ready-to-go patient in the waiting room at their scheduled bi-weekly therapy appointment time, you are privy to the behind the scenes work it takes to actually get a wheelchair-bound adult bathed, dressed, fed, and loaded into some sort of wheel-chair accomadating vehicle so that they can get to their bi-weekly therapy appointments. You see the chronic pain, the tired caregivers, the poor living conditions. You see how most people's days are filled with a mind numbing amount of TV watching because that is the only activity they can participate in.
Brokenness surrounds me in another ways too. Cory and I started a business last year working with foster and adoptive families. Their stories will overwhelm you. Our family had some hard years, but nothing like this. Our chaos mostly came from our sheer numbers multiplying quickly as we tried to navigate an impulsive toddler, some attachment stuff, medication trials, and trying to settle different personalities into one cohesive sibling group of 8. Really, if only our family had about 7 more moms we could have healed much faster. Everyone needed a mom and there was only one of me!
We are in a good place now and we love working with other families in the trenches, but man it is heavy work. I, of course, won't share others stories, but if you are curious about what I am referring to and need specific examples in order to understand the reality of traumatized children and the second-hand trauma imposed on a family then I encourage you to read the book "Born Broken" by Kristen Berry. It is a sobering memoir of how a birth parent's "free will," combined with an imperfect government system attempting to re-right the wrongs of those "free will choices" can result in a broken child. Her story of watching her daughter huddling the younger children out of the kitchen, while she fended off an aggresive intruder will make your knees go weak. The intruder was her son.
I'll be honest. It's really hard to be surrounded by brokenness all the time and continue to believe in the goodness of God. The now deceased theologian who I mentioned above, Rachel Held Evans, said it best in her book Searching for Sunday:
Both died of disease because their bodies turned against them. Both died too early. The former at 57 and the latter at 37.
I am familiar with the theology that explains evil exists in this world because people have free will and sometimes harm is caused because of the choices of others. For example, I understand that God saving the victim killed in a drunk driving accident might be tricky because free will allows the other individaul his choice to drink and drive. The movie Bruce Almighty plays this type of theology out on a large scale. It shows how humans are connected and God intervening and changing the course for one life has ripple effects that may change the course for all. I get that to an extent.
But that theology falls short for me when it comes to diseases. Why couldn't God just heal? Why couldn't he intervene? Doing so would have impacted no one else's free will.
In my life, I am surrounded by a lot of brokenness. I am an Occupational Therapist and work with people with disabilities and disease. For the past 1 1/2 years, I've worked with adults and the elderly, not at a clinic, but in their homes. It's different being in their homes. You see more. Instead of greeting a fully-dressed-ready-to-go patient in the waiting room at their scheduled bi-weekly therapy appointment time, you are privy to the behind the scenes work it takes to actually get a wheelchair-bound adult bathed, dressed, fed, and loaded into some sort of wheel-chair accomadating vehicle so that they can get to their bi-weekly therapy appointments. You see the chronic pain, the tired caregivers, the poor living conditions. You see how most people's days are filled with a mind numbing amount of TV watching because that is the only activity they can participate in.
Brokenness surrounds me in another ways too. Cory and I started a business last year working with foster and adoptive families. Their stories will overwhelm you. Our family had some hard years, but nothing like this. Our chaos mostly came from our sheer numbers multiplying quickly as we tried to navigate an impulsive toddler, some attachment stuff, medication trials, and trying to settle different personalities into one cohesive sibling group of 8. Really, if only our family had about 7 more moms we could have healed much faster. Everyone needed a mom and there was only one of me!
We are in a good place now and we love working with other families in the trenches, but man it is heavy work. I, of course, won't share others stories, but if you are curious about what I am referring to and need specific examples in order to understand the reality of traumatized children and the second-hand trauma imposed on a family then I encourage you to read the book "Born Broken" by Kristen Berry. It is a sobering memoir of how a birth parent's "free will," combined with an imperfect government system attempting to re-right the wrongs of those "free will choices" can result in a broken child. Her story of watching her daughter huddling the younger children out of the kitchen, while she fended off an aggresive intruder will make your knees go weak. The intruder was her son.
I'll be honest. It's really hard to be surrounded by brokenness all the time and continue to believe in the goodness of God. The now deceased theologian who I mentioned above, Rachel Held Evans, said it best in her book Searching for Sunday:
"I became a stranger to the busy, avuncular God who arranged parking spaces for my friends and took prayer requests for weather and elections outcomes while leaving thirty thousand children to die each day from preventable disease. I lay awake at night, begging an amorphous ghost of a deity to save me from my doubt and help me in my unbelief... The words of the worship songs in chapel tasted like ash in my mouth. I felt my faith slipping away."
This is exactly how I feel anytime I am among a group of worshipping Christians when the ever-popular song "Good, good Father" is in the lineup. I get angry and jaded and let my bitterness take me to a place where I believe that people who can sing that song with a clear conscious must have isolated themselves away from the brokenness of the world. Surely they have created a bubble in which their gated neighborhood, private-schooled, low-crime, drug-free, affluent, healthy kids, and white picket fence that matches their most likely white skin has protected them from seeing those that God has apparently forgotten to be good to.
Judgemental much, Christina?
I don't want to give up my faith. I believe in God. I believe in a Creator. I believe in a being that is so holy and so good. And so I began to wonder, maybe it's not God that is off-kilter, but it's the way we talk about him. Maybe it's the way we understand the Bible. Maybe it's our theology.
And so I've been questioning what I believe about God and not my belief in God.
The big question I am working out right now is God's sovereignty.
I grew up believing that he was all-powerful and all-knowing and all-present. He's the big three O's: Omniscient, Omnipotent, Omnipresent.
I grew up believing that he was all-powerful and all-knowing and all-present. He's the big three O's: Omniscient, Omnipotent, Omnipresent.
But...What if God has limits? What if there are things he can't do?
Most Christians at least believe a version of this. They believe that God cannot sin and is so holy that he cannot be in the presence of sinners. This resulted in a problem for Him, because apparently He loves us and wants to be around us. The solution to this problem is "Substitutionary Theology" where a holy Jesus took on the sins of all humans and now we as humans are sin free. It's a zero sum equation.
What if God has other limits?
What if God, who is a spiritual being, is limited by the way he can interact with a physical world? The Bible is full of examples of God using humans to accomplish His will. Abraham and Isaac. Noah and the ark. David and the giant. Frankly, even Jesus and the cross. The ideology I was taught is that God has a purpose and the ultimate point (and privilege) of being a follower is to be one of the humans that gets to participate in the redemption He can bring.
I totally get this version. I got to be a player in a redemption story with our first adoption. We saw first-hand how a terrible situation can be redeemed, not negated or erased or fixed per se, but got to see how a negative thing can have value added back to it and become good. It was hard, but life-giving enough that we chose to adopt a second time. As one of my boys says, "Adoption is good, but hard."
But what if God doesn't use us because He wants to share the redemptive experience with us (as I was taught) What if He needs us? Like what if He can't work in the physical world without a human to work through? Actually not even just humans, according to scripture he has used donkeys, burning bushes, manna, storming seas and on and on. He has used people, places and things. What if God NEEDS nouns?!?!
This new theology, this new way of thinking I'm working through helps me reconcile what I read in the Bible with what I see in real life. There is brokenness in the world because God NEEDS us and we aren't doing our job. He would love nothing more than to bring His Kingdom to Earth, shoot- Jesus even taught us to pray for that to happen, but what if He can't because we won't help Him. The culture of His Kingdom is peace, joy, freedom, forgiveness, grace and on and on...all the good things. But what if our kingdom on Earth can't be that because we humans are the ones stopping it. What if God wanted my friend to beat cancer and what if God wanted Rachel Held Evans to keep preaching, but His hands were tied because our hands were idle.
It is easier for me to believe in a good God who by himself can't intervene in the brokenness than believe in a good all-powerful God who could intervene but just doesn't.
But what if God doesn't use us because He wants to share the redemptive experience with us (as I was taught) What if He needs us? Like what if He can't work in the physical world without a human to work through? Actually not even just humans, according to scripture he has used donkeys, burning bushes, manna, storming seas and on and on. He has used people, places and things. What if God NEEDS nouns?!?!
This new theology, this new way of thinking I'm working through helps me reconcile what I read in the Bible with what I see in real life. There is brokenness in the world because God NEEDS us and we aren't doing our job. He would love nothing more than to bring His Kingdom to Earth, shoot- Jesus even taught us to pray for that to happen, but what if He can't because we won't help Him. The culture of His Kingdom is peace, joy, freedom, forgiveness, grace and on and on...all the good things. But what if our kingdom on Earth can't be that because we humans are the ones stopping it. What if God wanted my friend to beat cancer and what if God wanted Rachel Held Evans to keep preaching, but His hands were tied because our hands were idle.
It is easier for me to believe in a good God who by himself can't intervene in the brokenness than believe in a good all-powerful God who could intervene but just doesn't.
At least that's where I am today.
posted by Christina at
1:56 PM
1 Comments:
Beautiful - thank you so much for sharing these thoughts. I love the “God needs nouns” - and I’m on a similar track figuring out all the similar hards, in such contrast to theology that just doesn’t make any sense. Nevertheless, we carry on. Thank you.
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