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I saw this in my Google+ feed today (see quote below). Stuff like this irks me. I will be the first to admit, I am very confused when it comes to understanding if and how much God participates in our lives. I really want to be open and humbled for all my blessings but it makes no sense to me that God would interfere. In certain cases blessing someone means outright denying someone else the same blessing. Favoritism? What does that mean when it isn’t one of God’s elect that gets the blessing? The other issue I have is that interference from the Lord seems like it would constitute a deprival free agency. What are blessings anyway? Are they the specific things that happen to us every day? Our steady job and food on the table. Or is it more abstract, in an everything we have comes from the earth God created kind of way?
I am interested to know how others balance the ideas of blessings, miracles and coincidences while still trying to remain thankful for blessings.
Quote:Me: God, can I ask You a question?
God: Sure
Me: Promise You won’t get mad … … … …
God: I promise
Me: Why did You let so much stuff happen to me today?
God: What do u mean?
Me: Well, I woke up late
God: Yes
Me: My car took forever to start
God: Okay
Me: at lunch they made my sandwich wrong & I had to wait
God: Hmmm
Me: On the way home, my phone went DEAD, just as I picked up a call
God: All right
Me: And on top of it all off, when I got home ~I just want to soak my feet in my new foot massager & relax. BUT it wouldn’t work!!! Nothing went right today! Why did You do that?
God: Let me see, the death angel was at your bed this morning & I had to send one
of My Angels to battle him for your life. I let you sleep through that
Me (humbled): OH
GOD: I didn’t let your car start because there was a drunk driver on your route that would have hit you if you were on the road.
Me: (ashamed)
God: The first person who made your sandwich today was sick & I didn’t want you to catch what they have, I knew you couldn’t afford to miss work.
Me (embarrassed):Okay
God: Your phone went dead bcuz the person that was calling was going to give false witness about what you said on that call, I didn’t even let you talk to them so you would be covered.
Me (softly): I see God
God: Oh and that foot massager, it had a shortage that was going to throw out all of the power in your house tonight. I didn’t think you wanted to be in the dark.
Me: I’m Sorry God
God: Don’t be sorry, just learn to Trust Me…. in All things , the Good & the bad.
Me: I will trust You.
God: And don’t doubt that My plan for your day is Always Better than your plan.
Me: I won’t God. And let me just tell you God, Thank You for Everything today.
God: You’re welcome child. It was just another day being your God and I Love looking after My Children…
Share if you are thankful to GOD too
I have contradictory thoughts and feelings regarding this which probably means I don’t really know what I believe. There are times when I feel that Heavenly Father has intervened on my behalf and has directly blessed me in the “little things”. The scientific side of my brain says it’s all coincidence. From a doctrinal point of view it seems that free agency is the rule here and that divine intervention is rare, otherwise free agency is quickly relegated to a mere rule of thumb. After all, in wars each side is praying fervently for the other side to die quickly. BYU would win all its football games and Notre Dame would win all football games except for when it plays BYU. Allowing free agency is the only way I can get past the whole “why do bad things happen to good people” conundrum.
However, I think it can be healthy (if not taken overboard) to have a humble, thankful attitude in life. People with chips on their shoulders can be unbearable, as can the people who thank HF for blessing their home run. If you are thankful for your job, you may be more inclined to realize you’re not entitled to it, and more inclined to help those who are struggling financially. Similarly, perhaps being able to accept a little bit of randomness in life is healthy – because sometimes crappy things happen to all of us.
Not long after my losing my son hours after birth, I came to the conclusion that God doesn’t get involved in our lives. I fully believe that He allows us agency and that’s the end of it. If this isn’t the case, well, then I have a beef with Him for letting my son Die DESPITE being a TBM at the time and having faith that He could save him if He wanted to. I feel that we often attribute too much to God’s hand, and always the good. What’s up with that? Like Roadrunner I feel that if God were to get involved it would feel like favoritism, that he were a respecter of persons. This being said I have no Idea how to explain miracles. Does faith actually unlock some other functions in our brain? If someone has faith to be healed can they really heal themselves (when a priesthood holder blesses them?). Are bigger miracles such as unlocking the heavens and letting rain come (done in Chile by some apostle one year I heard while down there) just coincidence? I’m not sure but I lean toward this and no longer have faith that God will intervene in my life.
Of course, this doesn’t stop me from giving thanks for my “blessings” either. I mean, he could do bad things to me but he doesn’t (at least I hope not). That’s got to be worth something. And he did give me the opportunity to be here and thereby enjoy all that I have. So I still feel comfortable for the blessing He gives me even if it’s an indirect way of giving.
I grew up on the farm, and have always enjoyed this thought conundrum: Brother Jones and Brother Smith are both farmers in the same little valley. Both are very faithful saints. In mid-July, both farmers notice a thunderhead starting to build. Farmer Jones immediately hits his knees and prays “Dear Lord, I’ve got 40 acres of corn that hasn’t seen a drop of rain all summer. I’ll lose this crop if it doesn’t get a bit of rain soon. Will you please open the heavens and give us some rain?” Simultaneous to this, Farmer Smith hits his knees and prays “Dear Lord, I just cut 40 acres of alfalfa and it’s still sitting in the field. If it rains on that hay I won’t be able to bail it and I’ll lose the crop. Will you please stop up those clouds and spare us from the rain?”
So no matter what happens, one good brother is going to pray that night and say “Thank you, Lord, for hearing my prayer” and the other is going to say “Why, Lord, did you not hear my prayer?”
Of course, I have no answer to this.
I have no idea – except that there have been times in my life when I am convinced He was there in an active way. Otoh, I believe we are gods and children of the Most High God, so I think God is involved as much as we are willing to be involved.
I’m pretty far from being able to have a good answer to this question. However, this is pretty central to many things I am working through right now, so I have come up with an idea that works for me until I have figured this out.
It is good to be grateful, and it is good to be forgiving, it is good to be responsible.
When something good happens, it is good to be grateful for it; to God, the person responsible, karma, whatever.
When something bad happens, it is good to forgive the person responsible, even if it is yourself and not blame people or God for it.
When either happens, it is good to understand why it happened so you can either make it happen again or avoid it.
The short answer to the title question: As much as we allow Him to act through us. The ideas that the story illustrate are mostly superstition IMO.
If God pulled out altogether, either Evil would take over completely, or the Universe would disintegrate into total chaos and cease to exist, IMHO. Orson wrote:The short answer to the title question: As much as we allow Him to act through us.
I quite like that thought. The idea that stands out to me is that God’s participation in our lives is mainly to serve others. It changes the notion from what is he going to do for me, to what is he going to help me do for others.
I just finished day 16 of Deepak Chopra’s 21 Day Meditation Challenge. Today’s centring thought was “Today, I remember to be grateful.” For me it was a well timed message and thought for contemplation, especially given my reluctance to ask for blessings. One that struck a chord with me was that being thankful is a good way of asking for blessings. By acknowledging the good things you have it is like saying: “This is good, can I have more of this?”
Thanks for all your thoughts and input on this.
Quote:The short answer to the title question: As much as we allow Him to act through us.
Love this response.
God could have just kept the drunk driver off the road. He could have healed the sick person, he could have just fixed the foot massager. So the problem I have with this stuff is it shows how inefficient God really is. He can not just fix the root of the problem but according to stories like this he can only come up with a patch. In many cases he even picks to spare one person at the expense of another. I just think it is weak to say God is doing stuff like this because an all powerful God could do so much better. I am going to have to say God intervenes very seldom. In fact his plan is to be hands off and just let things flow. It is the only reasonable answer considering what you see when you look around.
@Cadence Amen!
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For my own two cents worth: I really believe that God is a respecter of persons and plays favorites – unabashedly. Much of the scriptures seem to more emphasize the “carrot and the stick” where you are “blessed” if you do what is expected and “punished” if you do not. This sounds so much like CONTROL to me that it seems the antithesis of true “free agency.” Sure, ultimately you can choose do do what brings the reward or the punishment, but WHY? Why would we need to learn this in this life? Surely even single-celled organisms can determine dangerous or bad stimuli and engage in rewarding behavior. It doesn’t require intelligence – just senses to do this. If God were more interested in helping us learn how to choose for ourselves in the midst of crisis as good as we can rather than “choose my way or the highway”‘s method of “pick God’s plan for you because it is SO MUCH more superior to anything you would pick” (I could make pretty good choices too if I was omnipotent and omniscient), then I could buy into this better.
I get the feeling that sheep are used as a metaphor so much in the gospel because that is what they would like our behavior to most conform to – a kind, gentle shepherd loves us and knows us more than we love or know ourselves and wants to take care of us as long as we stay within the sheepfold. He will protect us there from wolves or thieves who want to do us harm as long as we don’t wander. We always hear about how Jesus taught to “leave the ninety and nine” and go after the one who went astray, but so much of the focus in this church seems to be exactly the OPPOSITE – always work to strengthen the 99 so they don’t wander off, and it would be nice if the lost one(s) eventually came back, but we are more focused on keeping them within the sheepfold than making sorties into the world to try to give a reason for those who are lost to come back. I know I am cynical, but this is how I see it and what I hear from talks and General Conference all the time. Preaching to the choir, let the people in the rear get up and walk out.
The problem here is God’s participation vs free will. Exactly. One of the great paradoxes of theology.
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