Without a plan

The weekend is here and I can finally write off a bad week. I haven't had a slump that bad in quite a while and it's still fighting me a little bit, but there are small signs of life - it feels like I am coming up for air.

And old friend (almost something more) burst back in to my life - this could get interesting, but my biggest problem is always trying to live life before it happens (or after for that matter) and expecting too much. Deep breaths....but the light is still there. Maybe it's a door in another part of life opening when in the one I am so desperate to change, I keep running into walls.

If only I could read the signs better or hear a little better. I've never found talk about God's "plan" all that helpful because my life seems so without direction and the times I think I feel nudges, I seem to end up turning the wrong way. It's like a reflection, a movement on the edge of my glasses and I turn my head to find it was only shadows and light or even a speck of dust. The moments where it seems God should speak, I end up hearing just myself.

Jesus said to him, "‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe." (John 20:29)

I haven't seen or if I have it has been the images that float past the corners of my eyes and I can never be quite sure - it's enough to hope I suppose, but it's never quite enough to grasp and be sure. But would I hold too tightly to it if I could somehow get a hand on it? I have seen faith squeezed to death by all the plans people see God making - I think Fueurbach got it partly right when he said that faith was projection - it can be when we confuse God's plans with our own desires or our need for self-justification or with a simple formula for "salvation" that cheapens the best of God's plans.

And then there's all that is beyond me - and to hear the struggling for words and faith in response to this recent and other natural and human disaters. I cannot believe in a God whose "plan" it is to cause/allow so much death and suffering. I cannot believe in such a mechanistic God - pulling the strings of world events. I think we misunderstand the working of God and the concept of omnipotence isn't helpful.

As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. ²His disciples asked him, "‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?"’ ³Jesus answered, "Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God'’s works might be revealed in him." (John 9:1-3)

God is not the source of the disaster or the illness or the suffering - as time has gone on I have less need to answer the "why" of these things happening - because I don't need God to be all-powerful or step in magician-like to stop the bad things from happening; I want God to be there in the heart of the bad things and I think this is the incredible choice that God make through Jesus on the cross or no, choice is the wrong word. I think the cross is the ultimate demonstration of what God's power is - to be present in the very worst situations, to enter into them with us, to lift us out in the end through the power of love.

It's a different kind of power, a different kind of plan. God doesn't cause the pain, but works through it to bring us back to communion, to community, to remind us how fragile life is and how beautiful, to call us out of our complacency and neglect. God didn't send the hurricane, but is moving in the hearts of people to convict them about the poverty and inequality in our country that the devastation has revealed. It wasn't God's plan for so many to be left homeless and needy, but God is working in hearts to remind us who our neighbors are and to point us to all of our other neighbors around the world.

Not power, not control, not a plan for each life that leave the most anal among us without compaint.....but a God of love, and that for me is of greater comfort, even when I don't know where I am going, even in the darkest moments, even in the greatest tragedies - I'd rather have love than power. I'd rather have the cross than the king.