"God Did This for Me"

Relaxing with a free weekly neighborhood tabloid one morning I browsed a story about a local beauty pageant. The victor was a young Christian woman who thanked God for helping her win. Naturally I pondered that very sincere statement of gratitude, and asked myself the usual litany of questions about how God relates to us and the world. Why or how did God help this woman win the pageant?

Is God involved in such affairs? How does God decide when and where to alter the course of events? Is there a “divine plan?” If there is, is it a big, general plan for the universe, or are details scripted as well? Do my prayers make a difference? If they do, why are some of the things I ask of God realized, and others not? What happens to people who have no one to pray for them?

One compelling answer to the problem of prayers “fulfilled” and “ignored” came to me quite by accident. I was sitting in a parking lot trying to find a certain radio station, when I mistuned to what must have been a Christian broadcast because a man was preaching a sermon about prayer. He said that prayer is not about getting God to comply with my desires, but moving me toward a “place” of closer accord with God’s desire for me and for the planet. I’m paraphrasing this of course but this was the essence of the preacher’s message.

It reminded me of what Jesus says in John 14 about God doing whatever we ask if we pray “in Jesus’ name,” which means we pray as Jesus would and for the things that he would pray for, were he in our place and time. That’s what it means to act and speak in anyone’s name. We act as their representative.

This was in part what Jesus meant when he said - also in chapter 14 – that we will do greater works than he did because he returned to God. He didn’t mean that we would be doing bigger and better miracles than he did, but that in our lives, if we let him live in us and conspired with him to bring God’s love and justice to this world of ours, we would carry on his work in ways and places unforeseen and envisioned by God alone.

How remarkably different might this planet be if we all opened ourselves to God this way! Even if my prayers are colored by my egoistic dreams and desires, they are still openings into my heart and soul for the love that continually creates, dreams and sustains all that is. So the young woman gives God the credit for winning the beauty pageant. Well, it’s a beginning! Why not thank God for everything? I hope she finds reason to be as grateful to God for the harder lessons of life that will come her way when she doesn’t win something, or when her heart is broken in love or she loses someone dear to her when, in the course of time, they die. May she find God in all things.

We humans, at least we homo sapiens, have real difficulty imaging God as personal if she, he, or it doesn’t look like us. How can God be in relationship with creation and creatures if God is “simply” (!) Being, or the “Ground of Being,” like the “Force” in Star Wars or Brahman in Hindu-ism? Are our only choices for creating an image of God “humanity writ large” or an impersonal, omnipresent energy? I believe this is simply a failure of the human heart and mind - a form of spiritual bigotry - to feel and believe that unless God is somehow human like us God can’t be in a personal relationship. God simply can’t be personal without being a “person,” we think.

Yet the energy that flared forth at the Big Bang also manifests in this cosmos as beings like you and me who are capable of life and consciousness and love and relationship... and probably so much more than we can possibly begin to imagine! It is all right, I think, to imagine God “like us” as long as we know that our pictures - like our prayers - are opportunities for connection with the Real Thing (who is a Who and not a Thing). To believe otherwise would of course be idolatrous, pure and simple. Even the notorious idol worshipers against whom the prophets of the Hebrew Bible preached knew that their statues were not the gods themselves. Images and words and doctrines are the way we are enabled to connect to the reality that inspires them. But idolatry is so much more insidious when we say that God must look or act like us to qualify as a person.

“My thoughts,” says the Lord, “are not like yours, and my ways are different from yours. As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways and thoughts above yours.”

- Isaiah 55:8-9

Peace, Randy

Image found here: http://www.artprize.org/52222, by June Lee