Starting about two years ago I began to grow quite tired of hearing people talk about how much God cares about human life.
And my sentiments regarding this only continue to grow over time.
This is not saying He doesn't care about human life. He does.
It's saying God values human life differently than humans do. And we are continually attempting to transpose our value into God's mouth. When are we going to stop?
We act, live and think as if God is not still in the business of sacrificial love.
It is this observation that He is.
Don't think I am immune to this, or that I might be barking because I'm the dog instead of the fire hydrant as far as this is concerned.
I exist, yet I have had my own life squelched for another's sake. The pain I see in them because of this living death sears the core of my soul with a ferocity and frequency which won't be discussed here.
I have seen life sacrificed for my sake. And I'm not talking about relatives dying of old age and cancer, nor soldiers whose blood rests on distant shores.
I know people who have life today because of humanly horrific circumstances involving death. And I know people personally who have been sacrificed for the sake of others.
I wish people would stop trying to peg God as having human sentiments about life and death when things happen.
It's rather underwhelming. It tends to really fester when things like tsunamis, 9/11, tornadoes and Katrina occur.
Yet to me it's no less hemorrhoidal when any scale of death takes place.
It would be good if we as a group would just shut up more, and quit intimating that God holds human views of a variety of things, life and death included.
3 comments:
This provokes lots of different thoughts about our importance. How importat are we supposed to be anyway?
I don't mean this to sound cold, but I think sometimes we overestimate our importance. It's hard to understand how important we should be spiritually speaking though...I mean in one sense we are unique creations with unique purposes to serve and we are loved and cherished by a God who is personal and knows every hair on our head. But, then, we are also not really as important as we think we are. Where is the balance in that?
Clearly death, suffering, etc, sucks. But are we supposed to live without pain and tragedy or are we just afraid of it so we superimpose our feelings about this onto God, so we can feel like he cares about us? Because, you know, if he doesn't think it's a big deal, then that means he's a meany, bad, not nice God and I don't want to be his friend anymore.
I thought this a while back...we judge circumstances as good or bad contingent on how they feel to us, but God is not bound up in our feelings and maybe we needn't be either.
The longer I live, the more I begin to believe that life is a tutorial on acceptance. I accept whatever happens. Whatever doesn't go my way, whatever sings like joy, whatever burns like acid, whatever cleans like rain.
Hmmm...ok. I'm trying to understand where you're coming from, really. Intelligent writing so far...We'll see.
thanks for the laugh, IW.
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