Will
God Take Care of You?
May
10, 2021
The Scripture
quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible,
copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council
of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights
reserved.
Yesterday the
recorded worship service of the church to which I belong, First Congregational
United Church of Christ of Bellevue, Washington, USA, included the hymn “God
Will Take Care of You.” It’s first line is “Be not dismayed whate’er betide,
God will take care of you.” I couldn’t help but think, “Really? God will take
of us no matter what happens? I’m not so sure of that.” That line raises a
question with which I have been wrestling lately. Does God intervene in our
lives to help and protect us? My first answer to that question is no, God
doesn’t work that way. I have written quite complex theology that concludes
that God is in creation as presence but not as cause of what happens. I have
called God’s presence solidarity with God’s people in all that happens, but I
have not meant that God will prevent bad things from happening to us or our
loved ones. Just take an honest look at life. Bad things happen to everyone.
Bad things happen to good people all the time. We suffer economic hardship,
maybe even homelessness. We become ill and suffer pain or the loss of physical
or mental abilities. Loved ones suffer though they have done nothing wrong. Loved
ones die, sometimes far too soon. Sooner or later we all die. God prevents none
of those things from happening. Just look at Jesus, God the Son Incarnate.
Really bad things happened even to him. What makes us think that bad things
won’t happen to us? I want here to examine the rather complex relationship
between what we experience as God’s providential help and what we can actually
know about whether or how God helps us. This is a long post. I hope you’ll fine
it worth reading.
I have had
experiences in my life that look and feel to me exactly like God intervening in
my life in powerfully helpful ways. One of them happened in connection with my
studies for my M.Div. degree at Seattle University, which I began in 1997. I
had closed my private law practice the month before I began those studies, but
I knew I would need a job while I was in seminary. Through an ad in the help
wanted section of the Seattle Times I found a halftime lawyer job with an
organization called the Legal Action Center, a program of Catholic Community
Services of Western Washington. We provided free legal representation to low
income clients in eviction cases. For the first time in a long time it felt to
me like I was doing law worth doing. That job provided health insurance and a
25% reduction in my tuition at Seattle University. When I completed my studies
at Seattle University I told my boss at the Legal Action Center that I would
have to start looking for a fulltime job. He said how about we make this job
full time for you. Sometime later when I got my first call to serve as the
parttime pastor of a church that required me to be at that church one day
during each week, the Legal Action Center cut my time back to four days a week
so I could take that call. Only when that call went fulltime in 2003 did I
resign from the Legal Action Center. I cannot prove objectively that God found
that job for me and made it accommodate my needs so well, but it sure felt then
and feels now like God did precisely that.
Which brings me
to a second event of my life that I experienced as providential. I’ve told this
story before, but I’ll tell it again here because it fits the theme of this
essay so well. It happened much more quickly than did my experience with the
Legal Action Center. On Wednesday, July 31, 2002, at about 11:45 pm, my wife of
thirty years, the mother of my two children, died of breast cancer at the
relatively young age of 55. We had known for many months that her cancer was
terminal and that her death was coming. I thought I was ready for it. I wasn’t.
I thought I could handle it. I couldn’t. I completely fell apart emotionally. I
couldn’t stop sobbing. I felt an emotional pain I hadn’t known I was capable of
feeling. The first and at the time the only love of my life was gone far too
soon, and grief overwhelmed me.
On the morning of
Saturday, August 3, 2002, three days after my wife’s death. I stood in the
shower crying in grief. I started to sink to my knees. The weight of my grief
was just too much to bear. As I did, without thinking about it, I muttered the
prayer “Lift me up, Lord!” Immediately, with no time for me to have thought a
thing about it, some force I did not control lifted me up and put me back on my
feet. I didn’t do it, not consciously at least. I couldn’t have. When it
happened my first thought was, “O yeah. All that stuff I’m always talking about
really is real!” I meant of course all the God stuff I talked about as a church
pastor. I experienced what happened as God breaking into my life in response to
my prayer and doing what I had asked God to do. To me that experience was and
remains purely providential.
So I have had
experiences in my life that I have experienced as God taking care of me. My
marriage to my current wife Jane is another of them. Yet the question is
unavoidable: How do I reconcile my subjective perception of those experiences
with my reasoned theology that says God is here with us as presence in
solidarity but not as cause of the things that happen? My immediate answer to
that question is, I can’t. Those experiences seem simply to contradict that
theology, and perhaps that’s all there is to it. On further reflection,
however, I do have a couple of things to say that to some extent at least
reconcile my experience with my theology. They go like this.
First, it seems
to be true that our subjective experience of things can, at least on occasion,
contradict our rational consideration of things. Our experiences are not bound
by our theology Our explanations of those experiences are not limited to what
our conscious minds say is possible. Our minds function on at least two levels,
the emotional and the rational. Both of those levels have their place and their
truths, and those truths can contradict each other because they arise from
different levels of our psyche and are quite different kinds of truth. Rational
truth is precisely that, rational. It is thought-through truth. We arrive at it
through observation of life and reality that is as objective as we can make it.
It can and should take in all the information that is available to us about any
question we are considering. It is the product of our rational minds working on
what we know of reality. It is a perfectly valid type of human knowledge, of
human truth, because it is a product of what it is to be human, that is, to be
a creature with the gift of rational thought. It is or at least can be a
consequence of a consideration over much time of large amounts of experience
and information. It is truth persons other than the one who produced it can
contemplate, critique, and either accept, modify, or reject. Within its own sphere,
its own aspect of human consciousness, it is or at least can be valid and
vitally important truth.
Emotional truth
is different. It arises from the unconscious part of the psyche. It is more
immediate than rational truth, and it is not thought through the way rational
truth is or at least should be. It is felt more than thought. It arises
unbidden. It presents itself to us whole. It calls us to feel it more than to
think it. It cares not at all if it contradicts our rational thought. It is
personal, private even. No one can analyze its truth or critique it from the
outside.[1]
From the outside it may seem a-rational or downright irrational. Yet to the
person experiencing it, emotional truth is every bit as true as rational truth
can be. The rational truth is that God is present in solidarity with us in
whatever happens but is not the cause of whatever happens except in the sense
that God created creation, a sense so broad and vague that it cannot support
the conclusion that God is a direct cause of the things that happen in our
lives. Our emotional truth can be quite different. We can feel its truth, but
we can never know that it is more than a feeling. We can perhaps trust that it
is more, but we cannot know that it is more. When we sense an emotional truth
that contradicts what we know to be rational truth we just live with the
cognitive dissonance between the two. We accept that that is just how it is
with us humans. This conception of different types of knowledge is perhaps one
way to understand how we can arrive at and live with contradictory truths. We
can accept internally that God has done something for us even though rationally
we deny that we can know that to be true.
I began this
essay by referring to the hymn “God Will Take Care of You” and its first line
“Be not dismayed whate’er betide, God will take care of you.” I raised the
question of whether God really does intervene in our lives to take care of us. Like
I said, rationally I do not think that God does, but before I end this essay
let me suggest a different way of answering our question. This way of
considering the matter has to do with what we mean when we say God will take
care of us. Our answer to that question depends entirely on what we mean by
“take care of.” A great many Christians understand “God will take care of you”
in a way that is utterly untenable. They take verses like Matthew 21:22,
“Whatever you ask for in prayer with faith, you will receive,” and John 14:14,
“If in my name you ask me for anything I will do it,” literally. They convince
themselves that God will take care of them by doing whatever they ask God to do
for them. I even heard once of a woman who swore that every time she asked God
for an on-street parking spot in a crowded city center where such parking
simply was not to be found, she found one. Far more significantly, far too many
Christians pastors (and one is too many) have told their people that if their
faith is strong enough and they pray hard enough nothing bad will happen to
them or to someone they love. When a loved one for whom someone has prayed for
recovery from a terminal illness dies, far too many Christian pastors (and one
is too many) tell their grieving parishioner, “Well, I guess your faith wasn’t
strong enough or you didn’t pray hard enough.”
This way of
understanding “God will take care of you” surely has destroyed the faith of
countless Christians over the centuries. It destroys faith because it is simply
and undeniably false. Prayer doesn’t work that way. God doesn’t work that way.
This theology says that we mere mortals can get God to do things God would not
otherwise do just by believing and praying hard enough. Perhaps the
Deuteronomist could believe that ancient Hebrews could manipulate God that by
way by zealously obeying Torah law, but anyone today with open eyes and an open
mind can see and understand that this way of understanding faith and God simply
isn’t true. Bad things happen to everyone, ourselves and our loved ones
included. Bad things happen to us because we are finite creatures not gods.
That means our lives are not and cannot be perfect. No amount of faith and
prayer will ever change that reality. God does not take care of us in that
sense.
Moreover, we
cannot rely on God to stop bad things from happening to everyone. Time and time
again people pray to God for something to happen, but it doesn’t. Or they pray
to God that something bad not happen, but it does. If we believe that God will
take care of us in the simplistic way we have been discussing, how do we
explain the cases in which some bad thing happens despite our faith and our
prayers? The only way to explain those occurrences is to say either that we
failed on our faith and our prayer or that some bad thing happened to someone
because that person was bad and unworthy of God’s care or even deserved what
happened because they were so evil. That’s the notion that lay behind Job’s
friends trying so hard to convince him that he must have sinned because he was
suffering. Neither of these explanations is satisfactory. The first one makes
bad things that happen to others for whom we have prayed our fault though we
had no actual part in what happened. The second one forces us to believe that
people we have known to be good, faithful people really weren’t good after all,
all the evidence of our experience of them to the contrary notwithstanding. The
notion that God will take care of us by doing what we want and by preventing
bad things from happening will not survive even minimal critical scrutiny.
Yet there is a
very real way in which God does indeed take care of us. Perhaps surprisingly,
one of the verses of “God Will Take Care of You” points us toward that way. The
second verse of that hymn goes:
No matter what
may be the test,
God will take
care of you.
Lean, weary one,
upon [God’s] breast,
God will take
care of you.
That’s how God takes care of us.
No matter what happens in life we can lean on God’s breast. In whatever we must
face in life God is there with us offering us assurance of God’s grace, God’s
compassion. Many of us know how comforting and supportive it is to have a human
shoulder to lean on and to cry on when life gets tough. God’s shoulder is as
big as the whole universe, and it is always there for us. God is bigger,
stronger, and more compassionate than we can possibly imagine. God can take
whatever we put on God, even our anger or rage at God if we have any. Our
prayers won’t get God to do something God wouldn’t otherwise do. Like I said,
that’s not how it works. Our prayers in times of trouble can though bring us
closer to God. They can open our hearts, our souls, to the very real care God
does offer. It is the care of concern, compassion, forgiveness, and love. We
must reject the common understanding of God’s care that is so simplistic and
false. We can instead enter into and give God endless thanks for the spiritual
care God does offer. When we do that we can truly say yes, God will take care
of us. May it be so.
[1] I
am not talking here about psychological issues. We sometimes tell ourselves
unhealthy stories about ourselves, our abilities, how lovable we are or are not,
or other stories that arise from psychological issues that result from the way
we were raised or some other psychological element of our lives. Of course if a
capable, lovable person tells herself that she is neither capable nor lovable
those who know better need to counter those harmful stories with the truth.
That however is a different issue than the one I am addressing here.
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