Changes and Reality

I had a lovely lunch today with someone who was in the church I was in 15 years ago - and it must have been about that long ago when I last saw her. Obviously there have been a fair few changes in that time.

She remembered me having a huge impact on her life. Apparently shortly before I moved away from the south 15 years ago, she was pregnant but at considerable risk of miscarriage. In one of the meetings she remembered me repeatedly asking whether she trusted God or the devil. Eventually she was able to look me in the eye and say "God" - and at that moment she felt something change. She carried the baby to full-term - apparently he's 6' 1" today! And she said she always felt that God worked through me specifically to "save" that baby.

But what impressed me most was the way she had changed as well. She has decided to take a sabbatical from church because she just felt it had become a club. She said she had been ill and under a lot of stress recently, and the church simply didn't know how to react, so people ignored her, for weeks. The leadership of the church has apparently since apologised, and suggested that there was a bridge between her and the church - but that the church needed to make the effort to cross that bridge. She also had moved away from a standard evangelical position. She stated her view was now that God doesn't necessarily just look out for individuals - so that God's plan doesn't necessarily mean that everything is going to be OK - but she admitted that church usually preaches that it is.

She respected that my decision to move away from faith was catalysed by the pain inflicted at the church's hands, but that there was a thought process involved too. And I think it quite upset her, that someone she saw as so passionate for Christ had turned her back on that whole lifestyle. But she was gracious enough to not to start the re-conversion dialog that I've had a few times over the past few weeks.

It has occurred to me more than once that when reality strikes, people's faith does change, and people's perception of what God is changes. There seem to be many different variables - omnipotence, morality, personal interest - and everyone seems to come up with their own balance. I see this in J - God is no longer omnipotent, but rather something constrained by nature and who can only work through "willing victims". I saw this in myself - God couldn't possibly be x because of my experiences. The problem comes when everyone validates their own personal balance - and you're left with as much confusion as when you started. And I ended up with the ultimate position that God simply couldn't exist, at least in any way that was outlined in the Bible and in Christian teaching - there were too many things that God couldn't be.

If you take the view that God is simply a way of explaining the inexplicable, and doesn't really exist, then all of those variables become irrelevant. Nature is harsh and competitive - which is why bad things happen. You simply don't have to answer questions about the morality of nature in the same way that you do about a "god who loves you".