No one’s denying it: We are living in interesting times right now.
You might call it differently: painful, difficult, heartbreaking. I call them interesting not because I want to downplay any of the heartbreak, difficulty and pain that so many people are experiencing these days. Many are losing their jobs, fearing for their health or the health of their loved ones, and might not know what to eat the next month, the next day, or even today.
Life as we knew it has changed drastically for many of us.
During days like these, I sometimes wonder what God thinks, how He feels. Maybe I shouldn’t put God in a box and think of Him in terms of human emotions, I don’t know. I am aware that my mind will never be able to fully grasp Him and who He is, let alone how He is. But somehow, I can’t help but wonder what would go through His mind, or God’s equivalent thereof. So, hypothetically, I am musing about God’s emotions as if they were similar to ours, keeping in mind that He is always much bigger and greater than any of that. I believe, though, that He has emotions: we are created in His image, after all.
During times like these, I am sure He is hurting as much or even more so than we are. Hurting for all the people that are suffering right now, that experience fear and anxiety on a level they never have before. Hurting with the people that are losing a lot, or everything. Hurting with the people that feel lonely.
I wonder, though, if He might be angry, too? Angry because so many people still don’t turn to Him when He could, in many ways, give them what their hearts are truly yearning for (even if they don’t know it)? I know we might not want to hear this. I don’t want to offend anybody by saying this, and I’m also not saying that life would immediately get better for anyone who turns to Him. In fact, it often doesn’t. For some it even gets worse.
Imagine this: If you are driving with someone in the car and the driver is constantly turning left even though you know he should turn right, wouldn’t you get angry at some point? If you know turning right will bring you to your destination and you tell the driver, and he constantly ignores it and goes left, wouldn’t that, sooner or later, make you angry?
I am not saying that God just gets angry for no reason. He is LOVE, and love is ALWAYS patient and kind. However, because He is love, and because He cares so much, wouldn’t it be logical for Him to also get angry when the people He loves so much constantly go the wrong way? In a ‘righteous-anger’-kind of way?
Lastly, I wonder if He might look down on us, smiling. You know, the way a father smiles when his child’s freaking out about something that he knows he’s in absolute control of. The loving smile a father smiles when he knows he can easily fix his child’s problem.
These days, we read and hear about many different ideas, theories, and solutions. We hear stories of where the virus comes from, of what is going to happen, and how we can beat it. We sacrifice everything for the sake of health, and hope that we will stay sane through it all. That life would somehow normalize again soon. I know I sure hope that.
But practically, we have none of this under control. We don’t know if the theories and solutions they talk about will work. We don’t even really know if they are telling us the truth. We know that the world will look different. That is part of what makes so many of us anxious. The world is a mess, and we are freaking out. And I wonder if God smiles at us because He could easily fix all of our problems. (And yes: Why He doesn’t do so is a question I ask, too. I am trying to live with unanswered questions in my life.)
But God doesn’t just leave us when we freak out: He squats down and smiles at us. He is here with us, right on the same level. He can do that because He did that. He came down on earth and made Himself to be right on our level.
It was chaos back then, too. 2000 years ago, the Jews were under the oppression of the Romans and were praying for deliverance and freedom. Just like we are praying for deliverance and freedom.
Jesus then came into this world, and He wasn’t the Messiah they had expected. Today, He is right here with us and smiles, and lets us know that He has everything under control, even if that might not look the way we expect it to.
Because of Him, coming, dying, and resurrecting 2000 years ago, we can be children of God today. We can trust in a faithful God that has everything under control, even if it doesn’t seem like it from our point of view.
We know His anger has been taken away and put upon His very own son. We know His love will always be patient and kind, it will always be there in sickness and in health, during troubles and good times.
We know that our faith will carry us through, if we just hold on to Him.
As children of God, we have an eternal hope that puts earthly troubles into perspective.
As a child of God, I can call these times interesting.
