A REASON FOR EVERYTHING

I used to believe everything that happened had a purpose.  I was sure there was no such thing as coincidence, all the events of my life were part of god’s plan from the mind boggling to the miniscule.  I can’t think of a single scripture that actually says that but there are plenty of them that imply it.  I was not the only one who believed that.

I dare say most christians believe it to some extent or another.

When his followers were concerned about where their next meal was coming from Jesus pointed out that god feeds the birds and they were worth more than birds.  Even the hairs on their heads were all numbered.  Think about that.  Every hair on every head (well, except for bald guys) numbered.  Really implies god is very much interested in every single aspect of your life.  He keeps track of each hair on billions of people.

With that kind of attention to detail how can anything be just random coincidence?

Once you accept the premise that everything has a purpose or a reason, you’ve just gotten yourself into a huge can of worms.  I doubt everyone goes overboard with little day to day trivialities but what happens when something major happens?  There has to be an explanation for it.  Somehow it has to be part of god’s plan for your life.  God must be teaching you something.  God wants you to suffer through something so you can help others suffering the same thing.  He’s going to use your misfortune to bless someone else later on.  It’s in the rationalization of the reasons that you cause yourself the most stress and grief.

Why did god let my wife have a seizure and drive the car into the side of an office building?  I was at my faith peak when this happened.  It was insane the things I came up with to explain it.  The stupidest one of all was that he allowed it because she loved her new found freedom of driving more than she loved Jesus so he had to show her how wrong she was.  Jesus must be first in everything.  After all, he kept her from getting hurt, didn’t he?

It didn’t matter that we had just bought the car and it was a total loss.  It didn’t matter that the insurance premiums skyrocketed out of range of my budget.  It wasn’t important that the subsequent doctor visits with the extremely expensive medicines that our insurance didn’t cover nearly drove us to bankruptcy.  The financial stuff wasn’t important to god,  it just meant I had to learn to trust him more to supply our needs.

Nor was it of any importance that the testing of all those medicines severely altered her personality and nearly ruined our marriage before it even started. 

This is just an example of what kind of thinking believing everything has a purpose produces.  When I had the stroke, the same thinking kicked in but there wasn’t any faith mixed with it.  It led me to questioning everything I believed about my faith.  I started with the assumption that everything I believed was wrong, that somehow I had followed the wrong teachings or had misunderstood something vital.  That was how I gradually learned the truth that there wasn’t any god plotting and planning my life.   There is coincidence.  Shit happens.  Randomly and without reason or purpose.  The universe or even the immediate world around us is hostile to life.

It usually makes no sense whatsoever.

The deaths of my mother and my father-in-law were ugly, horrendous, devastating events.  There was no purpose in my mother suffering intense agony for three weeks.  No one got saved or grew closer to Jesus.  No one’s faith got stronger.  My father-in-law died abruptly without much warning, his health wasn’t good but nothing life threatening.  That has devastated my wife and her siblings.  He was the only thing that held them together as a family.  What’s the divine purpose behind that?

The problem is the rationalizing these events to make them fit the belief.

I know for a fact that this causes tremendous stress.  Much anxious hand wringing accompanied an abundance of prayer asking god for a reason to make sense of it.  Since no answer is ever forthcoming, your own mind starts trying to fill in the blanks.  Depending on how creative you are, you can come up with some seriously bizarre explanations.

Believe it or not, the stupidest idea I came up with to explain my wife’s accident was the one that satisfied both of us.  Looking back at it now, I can see how petty my god actually was, which is a pretty good indication of how petty minded I actually was at the time.  Imagine it, Jesus so wants to be the prime focus of your life that he allows (or wills) you to have an accident that destroys your car, part of an office building, your financial situation, causes years of disastrous drug trials which nearly cost your job and marriage, and severely pushes your faith to the breaking point.  All for what?  So that you’ll love him more and learn to trust him for everything.  Brought on by the joy my wife finally had at being able to drive a car whenever she wanted for the first time in her life.

That is a very small, pathetically needy god.

“God moves in mysterious ways,” says the previous generations.  We weren’t strongly religious when I was a kid but I heard this over and over.  It gives rise to letting your imagination run wild trying to make random events conform to your predetermined beliefs.  One of the great flaws of christianity is the idea that god leads you in the path you should follow.  This leadership isn’t verbal; it’s hunches, guesses, intuition, feelings, coincidences that can’t possibly be coincidences, mixed with a large portion of what you really want to be true.  If you claim you’re actually hearing the voice of god it’s the mental hospital for you but you’re still supposed to claim god is leading you, that still, small voice you know.  Interpreting bible verses to fit your situation is also encouraged.

But it’s all just guesswork.

You make stuff up to fit a pattern that isn’t really there.  How thoroughly you do this determines how much unnecessary heartache you cause yourself.  Sometime when I feel like really humiliating myself, I will reveal some of my more outrageous rationalizations.  I have trouble believing I was once so thoroughly deluded that I was sure god wanted me to start my own church.  All sorts of events made it seem so plausible, so necessary.  It started early on for me when I decided I was sent to the Baptists to wake them up spiritually.  When it became obvious they didn’t want to be awakened, it wasn’t too hard to shift gears and decide those were just training exercises.

Why, when they threw me out, it was just god telling me it was time to get moving.

Purpose driven life?

No, thanks.

Way too much trouble and far too complicated.

This entry was posted on 12. November 2009 at 17:59 and is filed under interpretation, communication, humor, wild guesses, listen, emotion, education, hearing, religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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