It’s been quite a hard week. I’m discovering it’s not easy being God. Firstly, not many people talk to you about it. Secondly, it comes with a lot of responsibility.
(Now just to clear this up a little – I don’t actually believe I am God in his entirity - I am part of God and he is part of me, just as Jesus who as our big brother, also said he was God. Think fractals. Does that help?)
So to elaborate, God is love and love is flipping hard. In my line of work, I meet a lot of broken, hurting people who are often either hopeless, helpless or worthless, or a combination of all three. That’s how they see it anyway. I would dearly love to fix them, to help them see a different way of looking at their lives. Many don’t seem to want to hear it…not in 10 minutes anyway. And that’s what’s hard.
It seems to me that I’ve had all this talk of loving someone, when actually what I’ve been trying to do is change them. Loving does not equate to fixing. To love someone is accepting, being and suffering with them. And realising that, I have so much more respect for God.
I realised this week what a stupid plan sending Jesus to save the world was if God wanted to fix everyone there and then. And why didn’t Jesus just heal everyone, all the time? Why did he not spend 70 years travelling the world sorting everyone out? Maybe God’s intention was to show us how to accept the brokenness in life, to identify with the hurt in others, and to teach us to suffer the pain of love for the sake of someone else. Maybe that’s not a quick fix, but maybe it is a better way than any doctor, psychiatrist, or psychotherapist can offer.
People want answers. They want to know why they have problems and mostly they want to know how they can make them go away…now. I realise I’ve bought into the instant-fix notion of life too. I believe God does change lives and I believe Jesus shows us how to live in that change. Change can only come through love and I believe that truly loving someone is about being with them where they are now and not trying to change them. We do the loving, love does the changing. And that hurts. And there’s no way round that.
So does God hurt? I think if he’s real then he does. And what I love about him is that from that place, he begins to change the hurt into something more beautiful. Pain becomes a signpost. Problems become lessons. Brokenness only leads to the treasure inside coming out – that is as long as we don’t try to stick band-aids all over it.
