WHAT DID YOU EXPECT FROM GOD?

I used to expect God to be in control over pretty much everything.   

If something happened, I figured God was the Almighty One who either caused it or allowed it.   Something good happened, God was the One who caused it.  And something bad?   God could have stopped it, but instead allowed it to happen; for reasons God alone knew why!    God was always in control over the universe, micromanaging from afar.   God was omnipotent, able to start or stop anything God so desired.   

I used to expect that from God.

Were you to ask how that used to work out for me, I’d have to admit that too much of my time was then wasted on my feelings of disappointment, worry, and sometimes outright anger in relation to the One I claimed to love the most.   God could have but He did not.   Did not save the child from being abused repeatedly.  Did not keep the drunk from driving repeatedly.  The serial killer from killing repeatedly.   The diseases for which we even had vaccines or medical cures from killing repeatedly.   Bad things from happening to good people repeatedly.

You name it.  I used to think God either caused it or allowed it.   Things I had prayed, begging, for him to heal or to help prevent.   Things God seemed to either cause or allow either way: prayers or no prayer.      

Then I changed.  Kind of.  

For another period of time I expected God to use all of our human tragedies and traumas for some good ending.   Told myself God caused or allowed things for a useful purpose.   Our pain would cause our gain.   God planned it that way.    Or so I then thought.  Bad things happened so better things could follow.

However, I began to notice things that didn’t just start out crooked, but they ended up crooked or even more so.   I saw how hurt people hurt people.   How victims became victimizers.    How families and entire communities that once functioned well became scarred for life, their innocence driven into chronic disease spreading from home to home, block to block, neighborhood to neighborhood, becoming exponentially worse.    The personal trauma became social tragedies.  One evil allowed became an epidemic of disaster.   If God was keeping score, then God’s desires were being defeated time after time, century after century.  

Maybe someone else needs to be in control?   Maybe I can’t really trust God to always cause or allow the best things to happen.  Maybe the worst wasn’t really meant to become the best.   Maybe something was wrong with God.    Or wrong with my faith.

Well, guess what?   It wasn’t God.   It was my own faith.

My faith was in the wrong god.    It was in a religious god.  But not in the righteous God.

Whoa, Dan!   You’ve lost me!   Where in the world do you think you’re going with all this?   What’s with this separation between god and God, religion and righteous?   Next thing you know I’m going to be saying there’s a separation between All Loving and Almighty.  

So, yes, let’s get that one out of the way.   An All Loving God would not allow wasteful suffering that led only to more suffering instead of less.   Allow new victims to multiply as new victimizers so, for instance, instead of a few thousand soldiers being allowed to die in ancient wars we could have a few million civilians dying in our modern wars.   What kind of loving god would allow pointless suffering if capable of stopping it and denying its spread, whether we’re talking about a bio-germ or a social-genocide?  

Now, if you’ve not already tuned out in despair, I’ll take it one step farther.  How about the difference between control and influence?

What kind of loving god or being of any kind goes about controlling those such a being has claimed to love?   Does a loving spouse go about controlling the other spouse?    Does a loving ANYONE take away another’s freedom to plan, speak, choose, act for that one’s self?   Or if one does so when the other is an infant, does one continue to lovingly infantilize the other forever?    Is that what love is really about?  Keeping another under one’s own control beyond infancy and early childhood, denying the other’s personhood, agency, development, autonomy?    How is that All Loving?

Should we expect such control from God?

I used to do so.

That was before my conversion and repentance.   Sadly, I waited til I was well into my 60’s before I came to accept the difference between that religious god of what I now call “fearful control” and the righteous God of “loving influence” as revealed by Jesus Christ, whom I personally believe to be the Incarnate son (human body) of God.  This is when I turned from following the religious god who took control over others to following the righteous God who gave influence with others.  The God who informed others’ decisions instead of deciding for others.   

I now expect God to rightly use perfect love as the preferred alternative to fear.

Which needs a bit of unpacking.

Here is what has been the most transformative for me.  My before picture looked like this: I conformed to the world’s shouts of fear that then drove me to seek control over whatever or whomever I feared.   My after picture (after the renewing of my mind / conversion) looked more like this: I followed the Spirit’s whispers of love that then drew me to seek influence with others as well as myself.    Lovingly so.    That is the difference Jesus has made in my life after hungering and thirsting not still for religion but now for righteousness.  Hence, I am so blessed. 

Was I finally born again?   All I know is I once was blind but now I see.    I once was disappointed in God for exercising control in hurtful ways, worried that Almighty God wasn’t all that loving after all sometimes, and angry that this “religious god” repeatedly let evil go and grow.   I now see that the Righteous God is All Loving instead of Almighty (what my Theology mentor, Tom Oord, calls Amipotence rather than Omnipotence).    That God’s very power is in the love that gives itself away, thus empowering others to think and choose for themselves, thus knowing the very love they can choose to live and share with others after having received it through God’s Holy Spirit.   

How else can I say this?

Love isn’t love until it’s given away, others have said.   It’s the power of synergy or multiplication by empowerment of those with less power and privilege; ones we call the marginalized.   It’s the power of right to make might; not the other way around as I used to believe and expect.  

So what to expect from God?

It took me over 60 years to figure that one out.    No sooner had God’s Spirit helped me work that one through by those inner whispers of loving influence overpowering the world’s shouts of fearful control than I found nearly perfect validation in my reading of Thomas Oord’s book, “The Uncontrolling Love of God.”    Also, Greg Boyd’s book, “Benefit of the Doubt.”   I came to see that if I was crazy for changing my mind about God’s absolute love with its requisite open and relational (thus relative) influence, then at least I wasn’t the only one. 

Each one of us carries our own expectations through life.   These are informed by the changing world around us, in part.   For those with less exposure to various changes, they may remain somewhat stable throughout life…….one year of experience repeated 30 times as opposed to 30 years of experience.   Such is the freedom with which humanity has evolved by what I regard as God’s creative design.   And within such freedom there is always a choice about what to expect from ourselves, other people, and even from God.    I suspect many folks choose to keep old expectations around from childhood on.    

That wasn’t me.  That isn’t me.    

So what did, and do, you expect from God?