The Will of God

I remember when I did my CPE at a mental health hospital. I was assigned to the adolescent unit and the second week I was there I was assigned a young girl who had been sexually abused by her father on repeated occasions. Naturally she was frightened, sullen, but most of the time she cried. She could barely speak a sentence before she would cry. Now I did not know all this when it was my turn to have the chapel presentation for the day. So I spoke of God’s goodness and God being with us no matter what. I thought I did a pretty good job and it wasn’t until I was called to come speak with a young girl who was “flipping out” as they told me on the phone. I arrived on the unit to find this girl screaming and kicking on her bed and yelling. No, no, no, God doesn’t care, God doesn’t understand.
I walked in quietly and sat on the chair at her desk and didn’t say anything for a bit. Soon she quieted down and looked at me – You are a liar. You don’t know anything about God. Your God is a hoax.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I guess the God I was talking about let you down, right?”
“You bet,” she said. “No God who loves me would let bad things happen to me.” She was yelling by now. “I hate your God!”
“Yep,” I said, “you have reasons to hate God.” (I was thinking to myself – what kind of pastor am I telling this girl she has reason to hate God – isn’t this blasphemy or something –but I plunged ahead)
She sat up and looked at me startled. “Are you telling me you agree with me – you preacher person who touts all this junk about a loving God? What kind of Christian are you anyway?” She was still yelling.
“A real one, I hope. I don’t believe in that kind of God – that controls everything we do. I don’t think God has anything to do with the abuse you took. I think God hates it as much or more than you or I. I imagine that God is filled with rage about it too. I am sure God is crying for you this very minute.”
Her eyes got kind of wide and she said, “that’s not what my pastor said. He told me that I must have done something bad or bad things would not have happened to me.”
Now I knew I was on dangerous ground here now because I definitely was going to contradict her pastor – but it had to be done. She was a member of a congregation and this what was they believed. If you live right, good things will happen, if you sin, bad things will happen.
I moved to sit by her on the bed and she scooted close to me. “Look,” I said, “the God I know loves us no matter what. God hates sin, God hates when people do bad things, but God loves us no matter what. Sometimes it does not make the sin any better but it gets us through the rough times. You did not do anything wrong to deserve to be abused. The person who hurt you was wrong, wrong, wrong. What you need is a good dose of love – real love,” I said.
I gently put my arms around her and she cuddled close and wept. She cried I bet for almost five minutes. “I thought I was the bad one,” she said. “Are you really sure your God is for real and still loves me?”
“I am positive,” I said.
“I wish I had your God,” she sighed.
We have been discussing the will of God in our Sunday Forum class. How do we know the mind of God? How do we know what to do when someone is ill? It is God’s will for everyone to be healed? Was it God’s will for this girl to be raped because God did not intervene? Of course not! These questions can get complicated and confusing but I think our inability to understand and articulate what we believe about God often hinders our desire to share God’s love with others. Since we cannot define the nature of God we throw our hands up and often leave the prophetic word of God to the fundamentalists! We desire to have answers and want to proclaim that somehow life with all its frustrations has purpose. Some people are comforted by the fact that God causes everything. Others find that this defies their very theology of a loving God.
We would do well to examine the stories in the Bible and see the multi-faceted sides of God, most of which we can understand only in part. However, to use the omniscience of God to relegate evil in someone’s life seems heretical to me.
The community of faith is where we can come together and dialogue about these tough issues. Let us pray and ask God to grant us wisdom and insight as we seek answers to life’s disturbing questions.


Reflection and Journaling
Blessing: How do you know God is at work in your life? Do you see the love of God around you? Name a time when you knew God was with you through a difficult experience.

Challenge: What are some questions you have about God that seem to have no answer? Do you own feel inadequate to answer inquiries about what you believe?

Prayer: Loving God, there is so much we do not understand about you. We long to have answers to our questions because so often we want things to be black and white. We are often frustrated by the gray areas of our lives especially when we cannot make sense of our world. Turn us away from easy answers and the desire to put you in a box. Create in us a wisdom that is birthed in love and nurtured with the shared faith of our church community. In the name of Jesus who seemed to always have the right answers, Amen.