Well I’ve dropped the ball a bit this week on ye olde blog. Mostly because I felt the need for a long, serious follow-up to my previous long, serious post. And that just didn’t seem fun. Some people are excellent at churning out long and serious. I need to work up to it. At the bare minimim I must march around the house with my fists to my temples shouting “A HUM INNA HUM INNA.”

Anyhoo. Got some interesting feedback on my essay. I liked Eun’s comment about not making God our “personal genie.” She also suggested a personal history of disillusionment that came through in my writing. True. I can’t complain a bit about my own life– quite the opposite in fact. Most of my sadness has come from comparing my life to others that have, in my estimation, a much harder time of it, both in this country and around the world. One’s lot in life seems so determined by an accident of birth, and that just don’t seem fair to an American girl with the whole “created equal” thing ingrained in my head. But that whole line of thinking is a maze of a journey with no answers, so I’ll just assign it to the “beyond my ken” category and leave it aside.

Speaking of which, if I got appointed Bible Editor I’d take out the “God’s deal with the devil” part of the book of Job, because it totally messes up the big showdown at the end. in which God most eloquently shuts down Job and his friends for having neither the right nor the capacity to know why things happen the way they do. It’s so funny that Job doesn’t get to know the reasons, but the anonymous omnicient narrator does.

Another friend mentioned that my point of view, while sensible, requires us to give up a “God is my buddy” perspective, which is scary. In some ways you do have to give it up (there are a few people in history who have been called friends of Jesus or God but that is not the primary relationship we have) and on the other hand, I think we can still look for evidence of divine care in other arenas without treading on God’s sovreignty. More below.

Kate wondered how prayer fits in with this hands-off view of life. An excellent question, and one that I haven’t thought much about. All I know is that we are invited and encouraged to pray as a way of participating in God’s work, entirely apart from any results. I pray for circumstances and situations quite a bit, but I don’t go so far as to say a certain outcome must be the result of my prayer. If something in a neutral or negative circumstance begins to shift inexplicably toward the positive, then I often suggest that people somewhere must be praying. Who knows how all that stuff works. Probably the real theologians have better ideas.