Philosophy and sore knees

Wow I am tired! I generally wake up very tired and perk up by 11 or so but today I am just a dishrag. Aagh. I tried protein in the form of leftover angel food cake with whipped cream which was yummy but is still not putting me over the edge into humanity. Dan had coffee with me and told me, all concerned, that I look really terrible. So I guess this morning feeling is obvious. It's a very beautiful day and I finished planting my garden this morning which usually would make me feel very chipper (all except the potatoes -that is a huge job and traditionally I do this with the kids and there always seems to be a thunderstorm that appears by the end). I'm not chipper. I'm just exhausted. Yesterday I did in fact go with the Cindy workout (which is pretty grueling) and then I vacuumed and mopped the living room (probably equally grueling). However that really is not generally enough to knock me out this hard. So that means it is probably hormones.

Anyway, writing is always something that cheers me up so here goes. Hmm. So I am still feeling extremely philosophical these days and using my time oh so wisely in trying to puzzle out answers to questions no one to my knowledge has ever actually answered. Why do good people suffer? Why does everyone feel certain that they know God's will and it is always diametrically opposed to the next person over? Why were we made in the first place if it is a human characteristic to screw things up?

I can't seriously contemplate that there is no God. Really that is too much faith for me. If I ever had any doubts at all, my anatomy class put them to rest. The human hand is a thing of wonder. It really is. Seth would feel the same about a frog or a tree.

Anyway, I have spent my entire life feeling close and cared for by an extremely personal God who I have communicated with relatively easily (especially compared to trying to communicate with certain people!). I could list off probably several pages of fairly direct answers to prayer or events that seem to stretch the odds of coincidence very far. I have studied the evidence for the Biblical account of Jesus to some extent and find it solid enough that I don't have any problems reading the gospels as historical fact. I think that the story of redemption through the cross is so simple, elegant, counter-intuitive, and outrageous in its claims that I cannot honestly imagine anyone making that sort of story up. Certainly not dying for it, as it is not a religion that, purely practiced, is calculated to give anyone any sort of personal gain. Quite the opposite. So I believe in God, and furthermore, I believe that He has gone as far as a deity could to communicate with us on our terms by actually becoming human, dying and then returning from the grave to assure us that he is in fact God. There is no other religion that comes close to making that sort of assertion. Or that paints such a complex view of a personality that is God. You just can't please him behaviourally or with magical thinking or by going through hoops. He requires less and more. All of that fits for me with what I would expect if there was a God who had the characteristics of both love and justice - two things that generally seem diametrically opposed.

Where I run into problems is always when I look away from the story of the Bible in its unvarnished and terribly readable form, and start to listen to other people's interpretations and where they go with what they believe. Then I get a headache. A solution to this is of course to keep my eyes down and just not listen to anyone who is claiming to know how to live. But that is also stupid as there are many really good insights that other people have that I will never come up with on my own. That's why we're all so diverse and why the diversity is healthy and beautiful.

Paradox and dichotomy and conundrum. Love and justice. Choice and dignity and evil and chaos. Individual self-determination and the infinite power of God. Nature and nurture, for Pete's sake!

So here's what I know:

not very much.

Here's what I think:

I think we are complex and infinitely interesting and our choices matter and have real consequences for pleasure or pain for an almost unimaginable number of other people because we are made in the image of God and that is the way he is. I think we are constantly horrified by death and our own mortality and the law of entropy because that situation is not natural for the planet - we were thrust into a state of dying and winding down at a certain point because of a collective human choice. I think that that choice is made in many little ways by each one of us and it boils down to saying to the universe, "I am God and you are not." I think that every time we say that we contribute to the wrongness around us because it is a statement that is NOT TRUE. No matter how much we wish it was.

I think that saying to the universe, "You are God and I am not" is the single hardest thing that any human being can say. We are saying it into the void because we can't see or hear or touch or taste or smell anyone out there. Which proves there is no one out there. Except we have other senses that we know very well mean something real and to discount them is to be as idiotic as the generation that truly thought science and education would save the world and which produced the atomic bomb as a result.

I think that all of us spend most of our lives trying to find what we can dimly sense out there in order to control it. We use religion, science, psychology, frenetic housecleaning, working too much, socializing too much, addictions, causes, and saving the world in order to impose some kind of order into what is essentially too big for us. I think that when Jesus came to earth and lived a life as God and man he demonstrated a conscious choice to give up control over his life and die. Which is pretty weird. And hard to emulate on any level.

I think that I myself am a control freak of almost unimaginable proportions. Oldest child alpha female +++. I think that a God who loves me probably would, if all of the above were true, continually challenge my sense of control over my own life. In fact this is happening on a pretty regular basis. I really hate that! At the moment my boys are both injured and unable to participate in sports. And my daughter's 6th goldfish recently died. There is very little that has happened directly to me that is as painful as holding my son while he cries because he won't be able to play capture the flag on a year end school trip because his knee is inexplicably screwed up. I can't help him and I can't deal with that. It seems ridiculous to me that this event would make me question the love of God on a cosmic level, but it does. It's hard to live in a world that is truly dangerous. Not just to me but to my children.

Are we at war? Is there an unseen battle being waged on earth's surface between good and evil, or are we just existing in a mindless struggle for survival - fittest of the species and all that? I want to believe the first and throw the second away as far as I can. I have spent my entire life working to help "the least of these" - children who need help and can give almost nothing back. So any sort of worldview that discounts their essential and intrinsic value is absolutely abhorrent to me. But thinking about a Marvel comics sort of fight going on invisibly around us just makes me raise an eyebrow and go, "really . . . ?" I can't get too far into that imaginary world without losing my ability to suspend my disbelief.

And that's probably where I am on this beautiful last day of May. Stuck between two scenarios that I find equally hard to totally swallow. I guess the best I can say is that I really truly do not know very much. Less every year, in fact. Except that there is a God. And He is God. And I am not. And love exists and we humans certainly did not make it up. So that's a hopeful sign!