What Happens When I Need Help From God

I have spent a long time contemplating God, but lest you think I am a holy man, I have also spent a lot of time pondering how to par the third hole at Bent Cudgel Golf Club and I have said things at that hole that I am neither proud of, nor would want my grand kids to hear, no matter how appropriate they were at the time and under the circumstance.

The truth is once my body quits golf, I will still be thinking of God. It seems that where ever I look humans are crying out in one way or another, "I want to find God!"

I recently read a story about a boy who went wake boarding with his friends. He wiped out and some lake water shot up his nose. No big deal, except when that lake water hit his olfactory nerves it left some amoebae on them.

Ordinarily amoebae are pretty harmless little creatures that just hang around water and eat waste on the bottom, but it turns out that the variety that went up the boys nose liked to eat nerve tissue as well as lake scum.

Those little creatures ate their way up his olfactory nerves and right on into his brain. Wow, what a feast, nerve cells galore. The sad fact was that 10 days after the boy was enjoying his day on the lake, he was dead, lying in the morgue.

Stories like this don't fit in with the popular view of God. Why did God make and amoeba like that? If he did, then why didn't he just stop them from destroying this child's brain? Trying to fit our picture of God into a random, violent world just confuses the bejeebers out of me. And that is why a lot of people just don't believe He exists.

You see, we want God, but not the real one, oh no. We want the God of our temproal exsistance and this is one of the answers to my Searching For God hub. We are looking for that God of the lost car keys. The one that will fix up our current circumstances so that we do not have any troubles. We want the Santa Clause Of The Universe. We imagine this god in our heads and then ask him for things and we get the answers we want about the same amount of the time probability would suggest, even if there were no God.

Just listen to any prayer and praise service. So much of it is an exercise in creating a god in our own image, one that cares about our puny life on this earth as if that were a big deal. In the grand scheme of things it doesn't matter if I am alive, dead, in pain, out of pain, rich, or poor. All the billions of people on this planet can't even be seen from the orbiting space station. We are like germs on a colorful cue ball. If you go further out you can't even see our earth or solar system. We are just a molecule in f the great wash of light in the Milky Way Galaxy and if our entire solar system disappeared, you wouldn't even notice it.

So many of us waste our time either denying that there is a God, or trying to do CPR on our made up god that we miss the real God and where He is. For the most part he leaves our temporal lives alone. Those who believe in God die in accidents just as much as those who don't and we lose jobs as much, suffer physical ailments as much and have as many problems as those who don't believe. Trying to claim that God makes a difference in our temporal physical circumstances is disingenuous.

Humans are not put on this earth for God's special purpose. Just as many believers in God have still born infants or an infant born with withering birth defects and when we try to promote a God of the temporal we make ourselves a mockery to unbelievers and then pin it to our chest like some macabre medal.

For instance, how can a church promote the sanctity of marriage between one man and one woman and still have a divorce rate the same as unbelievers. If the keepers of holy matrimony had kept it holy, this type of debate would by moot. But they not only have not kept it holy; many have not even kept it wholly in their pants.

I feel God thinks a lot less of our religious institutions than we do, because we have rendered so many of them worthless with the temporal value we place on them.

In the end God will help us if we let him.  But it will not be help in making our temporal lives comfortable.  If we found a man living in the sewer wouldn't it be better to get him out of the sewer before the spring rains come and drown him than it would to put our effort into making him ever so comfortable where he is?

I have been reading the bible and I can't find a single example of men and women of faith having there circumstances enhanced by believing in God. On the contrary, they were torn, sawn asunder, slaughtered, beheaded, boiled in oil, deserted on desert islands, tortured and feed to wild beasts.  If we can figure out what they were willing to do this for, then I think we might begin to understand where God is and how he will help us.