Trusting that God has existence under control and is unfolding life the way it should is hard. I have friends who say that there is a God but that God does not care what happens to us. And I can see how easy it would be to think that. God is either omnipotent or impotent. I am afraid that there is not much in-between wiggle room. God is implicated in the hard things that happen to us every bit as much as God gets the praise when good things happen. And I can see how essay it would be to spiritually devolve into a place of making sacrifices to an angry God like our ancestors did.
But my sense is that there really is a God and that that God really is all powerful and that that God really is involved. What frustrates me is that I am no quite sure how that works. And I want to know. And I can’t know.
What is prayer? How does it work? Do our collective thoughts become some life-changing energy? Do some people have more of that energy? Or do they connect to it better? Why do some of my prayers seem to be answered and others seem not to be answered?
I am content to believe that God exists and further, that God is a master architect and a loving one. I believe (on my better days) that prayer works and (on my better days) am content not to know how.
What I do know is that I am on this big green and blue rock in a cosmos in which this ball of water and land, life and love seem rather extraordinary. Do I wish bad, mean and stupid people could be prayed away into some great cosmic time-out? Sure I do. But What I think the world should look like is not the point. The point is that it all seems quite beautiful and the patterns of prayer and result seem overwhelmingly to indicate that God is at work.
In Lent, looking out onto a desert place, the sheer contrasts remind me that life is hard and that all shall be well. And how that will happen seems to be, happily, above my pay grade.
