Is God Around?

Just finished Jodi Picoult's book Keeping Faith about a seven year old girl who sees and talks to God.  She's a great writer and her books are page turners--but she is not a strong ending writer...If you are going to read the book and insist on being totally surprised...go read someone else's blog.  I'm not spoiling all the ending, just the part about God.

So the whole book is set up to illustrate the inexplicable miracle of faith and how one person's experience touches others.  Even the most skeptical and non-religious around Faith (the child) have to at least consider the possibility of God's love and existence.  No threats of hell, no condemnations...just this presence of loving and healing, and interestingly, suffering.

But at the end of the book, after all the decisions are made (and those I'm not spoiling for you), Faith goes to bed and seeks God and "no one is there."

Why is it that if we are not literally seeing God we assume no one is there and we are not being listened to.  Why do we make the leap that the reality of God's existence is only in the visible, physical presence.  No question that God is often difficult to sense...feelings of God's absence are common...we often can't see where God is or where we are in God.  No argument there.  But understanding God as the creator of our world, the giver of the grace we call Jesus Christ, the gift of salvation for all people...why would we assume that just because we cannot see or feel the work, that God is not working.

I've often wondered what was wrong with the Hebrew people who were brought out of Egyptian slavery by the visible power of God and as soon as things got rough in the wilderness, insisted God was not with them.  Ever had an experience with your child that after feeding them meals, taking them to school and activities, problem-solving with them, perhaps even treating them to ice-cream or allowing them to have friends over, washing their clothes, cleaning their rooms, providing their lodging and sustenance with your own job...then at then end of the day when they do not get the requested designer jeans the charge is..."You just don't love me!"

Ridiculous, right?  But the same assumption is fine when it is us and God.  Oh, poor Faith.  God abandoned her to the evils of the world.  She can no longer see God and no one is listening.

Eugene Peterson in his book Practice Resurrection, reminds us that "All Christian spirituality is thoroughly incarnational--in Jesus, to be sure, but also in us."  Growing up in faith means recognizing that most of us, most of the time, will experience the presence of God in and through other humans, in and through creation, in and through the discipline of serving others.

In a nutshell, the ending of the book made me mad.  God provided a wealth of love and security and healing in Faith's life...even provided the miracle of visible presence that most of us never experience.  Having experienced the grace of God through incarnational gifts from other humans, having read the history of God's work in the world in the biblical texts and in other people's stories, I recognize that God is at work even when I can't define God's work or perhaps even see it.  Ephesians challenges us to "grow up" and assume the presence and not the absence of God.  The lack of designer jeans does not equate to a lack of love from a parent.  The lack of being able to touch and talk to God in any form does not equate to the absence of God in our lives.

(I'm stepping off my soapbox...now...)