more II

There is other pain which can mesh with knowledge to do something good, strong, beautiful and/or powerful. This is aside from the God-authored "I want you to grow up as a Follower" pain.

This other pain is just simply pain from life. I'll leave it to the experts to talk about life-pain's relation to being of God or not, to what degree, how, how much is evil around us, how much is us stumbling ourselves, how much is God, all that stuff.

I'll leave that to others for now. I just simply know that people hurt and life is painful--in various degrees, on a pretty wide continuum. Some things are life-numbingly severe and traumatic. Other things hardly impact the breath. I've lived at both ends of the spectrum. One end for the very large majority of my life, the other end for a relatively short time. I know others whose lives are the inverse of mine, and I know people who are all along the spectrum.

One of the things that is very disappointing is the breadth of people who do nothing but fixate on "why" when something painful happens. In a way this doesn't really surprise. Society today is on such a binge for dissection, analyzation and complete deciphering, and wish this to transpire immediately. Everyone--the media, C/church, groups, education--are hyper focused on looking at things under a microscope and making lightning quick assumptions.

Pain can be analyzed and scrutinized under this microscope, yet the odds of pain looked at this way having the chance to mesh with God-knowledge to birth something good, beautiful or powerful are pretty much nil.

All the talk that I'm generally aware of, when a situation or life has been traumatic or painful, is (by a Follower) "why, God?" And by a non-Follower, "how could a loving God....?" I think these are valid questions, yet I also think pain is a time where God is wishing primarily to get our attention to listen, not flood Him with questions we want answered immediately. He cares about the questions, He does. It just seems people are programmed to fire off 20 questions at Him when stuff happens instead of (ever) listen. It seems people are programmed and eager to analyze microscopically when it would be better to view things macro. It seems people wish to kneejerk instead of not kneejerk.

And these things taking place are understandable. We're human, whether we're a Follower or not, and some stuff just crops up from within us innately. We hate pain, and it is our nature to avoid it, heavily question it and respond quickly to pain with simply the desire to have it gone asap. It's hard to be patient and to listen when hurt.

I think God does desire to show us and tell us stuff about pain, and to talk through things with us with regard to it. We're just not by nature oriented to be patient or unemotional about it. That's pretty much our nature. Which makes it hard to digest that pain seems to be the way God works good things.

Even if we can somehow come to be oriented well to God about pain, which is contrary to our nature to do, we can't really expect to know everything about "why". God will talk to us and show us some things about it. Other aspects of it He won't. Some of those things that we're thinking about aren't on His mind about it. There are some things our hearts aren't ready for when we ask the questions. God knows this and shows us mercy by not talking to us about them at the time. Some things He can tell us later down the road, when He knows it's okay then. Other things we will never know until That Day.

Some things are so severe it is essentially impossible to come to God about them. They could not be any more polar opposite than what we've always heard about Him. We talk to people who in some way linked or professed to be linked to God, and there is simply this huge, huge disconnect between our experiences and this "caring, loving God" stuff we hear about.

But I don't think people who actually know Him mindlessly blab "He cares about you, He so wants to bless you" garbage incessantly to those who hurt. It doesn't seem so because it is not my experience that He does this Himself. He doesn't say a lot of things that people who allege to represent Him say, I'm learning the hard way. It is so cliche, it is so mindless and shallow...it is very rotten fruit to the bruised in life.

And so where's the middle ground? God and pain, anguish, trauma. Got some more thoughts on this for later, just wanted to think out loud about some stuff here.