Why You Can’t Fight With God
Because He doesn’t respond. It’s that simple.
We get pissed off with people and tell them how we feel, punch them in the face, or intentionally ignore them, because we want to get a rise out of them. We want them to feel pain in some way. Mental, physical, emotional, relational pain. We want them to have an experience which communicates in some fashion that they have wronged us, and they must share in the discomfort.
We try to force them into a place where they must reply to us, respond to our attack against them. The stronger and more devious amoung us are sometimes content with not actually seeing the response, but simply knowing that there is one is enough. Knowing the other is reacting in some way to our own displayed discomfort.
This does not work with God.
Not that God doesn’t care, but it seem that he seldom responds in kind. Which for the most part is more than likely an example of Divine mercy.
Still it is a bit of a visceral disappointment.
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Isn’t “visceral disappointment” a good definition for all of life?
I don’t think I’m quite that cynical yet. However I am currently reading poetry by Mark Jarman, so that might change.
For example
“God is in the details.”
Albert Einstein
In which of these details does God inhere?
The woman’s head in the boy’s lap? His punctured lung?
The place where she had bitten through her tongue?
The drunk’s truck in three pieces? The drunk’s beer,
Tossed from the cooler, made to disappear?
The silk tree whose pink flowers overhung
The roadside and dropped limp strings among
The wreckage? The steering column, like a spear?
Where in the details, the cleverness of man
To add a gracenote God might understand,
Does God inhere, cold sober, thunderstruck?
I think it’s here, in this one: the open can
The drunk placed by the dead woman’s hand,
Telling her son, who cried for help, “Good luck.”
From Unholy Sonnets, Poems by Mark Jarman, published by Story Line Press, 2000. Copyright 2000 by Mark Jarman.