How God Rolls

How Language can Sabotage our Conception of God

Every rational conception of God is in itself contradictory. Faith in God is born of love for God—we believe that God exists by force of wishing that He may exist, and it is born also, perhaps, of God's love for us.¹

— Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life

We had a friend many years ago who had a child with a serious health issue. As many parents do, she often prayed that God would heal her child, something God never did. In response to God not healing her child she would say,

That’s not how God rolls.

Indeed.

When I graduated from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty Baptist College, now Liberty University, back in 1981, I was sure I knew exactly how God rolled. But as all of you know life can quickly cool those youthful, fervid passions in the frigid weather of life. I married in 1990 when my wife’s chronic illness suddenly escalated, something we are still dealing with 35 years later.

In those early married years my faith was strong. We prayed for healing, we anointed my wife’s head with oil, we laid hands on her along with going to countless doctors. She was able to get her life back to some degree, what she now calls her “half-life,” but full healing never occurred.

During that time I lost my faith. I wouldn’t say it was directly because of my wife’s illness (I was also doing an immense amount of reading and thinking), but I know, even if subconsciously, it played a role.

My wife says I never lost my faith, that that period was simply part of the progression of it. I don’t disagree with her, but at the time it sure felt like my faith was gone. In my Liberty Baptist College days I would have never thought that God might deepen someone’s faith or belief by the seeming loss of it. Losing your faith was backsliding for a Baptist, not spiritual maturation.

A few years ago I started exploring my faith again. What mainly brought me back was the evil that became so apparent during and after the pandemic. Things were so out in the open and the attacks on freedom, Christianity and traditional morality so obvious on a worldwide scale that it stirred a renewed belief in me. I was ready to reassert my faith if only to oppose the prevailing evil being pushed by our governments, the globalists, the legacy media and Hollywood.

I said to a couple of my friends, who have prayed for me for many years to return to my faith, during the recent health issues my wife is having, “You know, God sure doesn’t make it easy.”

He doesn’t. I’m told that God loves my wife. But what does that mean? I love my wife and if I had the power that God does I would heal her in a hot second. Why doesn’t He?

Does God love my wife? Not in any way that makes sense to me. When I use the word “love” I bring with it my human conceptions of the word and if I use it in reference to God its meaning is unclear because it is impossible for God to fit into my human ideas of love. My wife is still sick even though I’ve asked her loving Heavenly Father to heal her thousands and thousands of times.

We say, “God is faithful.” If I told you I had a faithful friend, but every time I asked him for specific help he refused, every—single—time, would you consider him a faithful friend? I wouldn’t. My point here is the same: we bring our human definitions for these words and phrases and attempt to apply them to God, when it is blatantly apparent that God is so far beyond our human understanding that it is almost absurd to attribute them to Him.

Often when my wife has had a stretch of feeling better well-meaning people will say “Praise the Lord.” But when I tell people my wife is struggling not one person has ever said to me, “Praise the Lord.” But if we’re being consistent, theologically correct, if God is in complete control, it would be appropriate to say “Praise the Lord” regardless of the circumstances. So what does that phrase mean? How relevant is it if we only use it when something good happens?

I’m not saying or asking anything new. These are age-old questions: Why does God allow evil? Where is God when I most need Him? I’m not criticizing God, that would be foolish, but what I am criticizing is our use of language in reference to God and our inability, at times, to recognize its inadequacy.

I remember driving by a bad auto accident with a friend. He said, “But for the grace God, there go I.” We’ve had a lot of discussions over the years, so I said, “So…where was the grace of God for them? God’s grace was there too, right?”

When I hear people say something like, “If I hadn’t left for work late, I would have been in a terrible accident. Praise the Lord!” So if you’d left on time, God couldn’t have kept you safe? Were the people in the accident thwarting God’s plan? There’s this idea out there that whatever you’re going through, whatever happens to you, God is trying to teach you something. What does that even mean? God couldn’t teach you something any other way?

This kind of thinking trivializes God. It puts God in a box of our own devices and makes God into some kind of super human life coach. My wife’s been sick for 35 years because God wants to teach her something? When she learns it, she’ll miraculously get well? It’s far easier for me to accept that I have no idea what God is or is not trying to do than resorting to all of life being God’s “teachable moment.”

I found it easier to deal with my wife’s illness when I didn’t believe than I do now because I didn’t have any expectations. “It’s just life,” I used to say. You deal with it in any way you can. There’s no sense complaining. Try everything in your power to change it, but if you can’t, accept it and move on. But with a belief in God, at least for me at this time, there is always the questioning, always the wondering: why won’t God heal my wife when very obviously He could? Does He have more important things to do? Maybe take care of all those sparrows?

But it’s not God that is failing, it’s my concept or hoped concept of God that is flawed.

In some ways it would be easier to think of God as not all-powerful, as if He was as upset as I am about my wife’s illness and was fighting against this chronic evil with the same intensity that my wife and I have been for the last three decades. Like we’re in this together and maybe we’ll get victory and maybe we won’t, but we’re a team, fighting side-by-side with the same goal.

But that’s not the case. If we believe in a Biblical God, He is all powerful and can do and not do whatever He wants. I like these lines from Jackson Browne’s song “Soldier of Plenty” from his album Lives in the Balance:

God is great, God is good
He guards your neighborhood
Though it’s generally understood
Not quite the way you would²

Indeed…again.

Some atheists are quick to tell us why God doesn’t exist, because of the kind of God they know should exist if He did exist. But God’s existence is not dependent on what any of us believe He should or shouldn’t be. If God exists, look at the world, this is the world we have and just because we don’t like the way it works, doesn’t mean God does not exist.

Our ideas about God always fall short, way short.

What God Himself is will remain concealed forever. And this is the highest understanding we can have of Him in this life—that we realize God is beyond everything we might think of Him.³ — Thomas Aquinas

On December 6, 1273, Aquinas, one of the greatest theologians to ever walk the earth, quit writing and dictating. Though encouraged to finish his Summa Theologica he refused saying,

I can do no more; such things have been revealed to me that all I have written seems as straw, and I now await the end of my life.⁴

What did he mean? Had he wasted his life trying to explain the unexplainable? Thomas Merton wrote:

But we must not be so obsessed with verbal correctness that we never go beyond the words to the ineffable reality which they attempt to convey.⁵

We’re human. We have to use words, even though those words are inadequate to describe the creator of the universe. Words and phrases are incapable, truly incapable of describing God.

In truth, they don’t even come close.

I’ve prayed a lot for my wife over the years. As I wrote earlier I often prayed for God to heal my wife, but after a while that prayer began to feel impotent, like an exercise in futility. So for many years I stopped asking, at times I stopped praying altogether. Like a friend of mine said recently when I asked him to pray for her, “I’ll pray, but my prayers never seem to do any good.” Exactly how I’ve felt for decades. But it’s not just a feeling, it’s based on the reality of my wife still being sick. The prayer I’ve prayed clearly is not being answered, that is, the outcome I want, the outcome I’m praying for has not been….been what? Granted? Allowed?

I’ve heard pastors and people say that God uses suffering, uses illness, uses the very difficult things in life to teach us what He needs to teach us. It’s similar to the idea I’ve heard that God had to give us free will, had to give us (Adam and Eve) the choice to sin or else we’d never understand His love and grace. I’m sure there are theological nuances I’m missing, but that’s the general idea.

These explanations don’t make sense to me. If God is all powerful, couldn’t He have done away with the opportunity to sin and still given us rewarding, satisfying lives with our free will intact? The answer, it seems to me, has to be yes, otherwise God becomes subservient to a particular plan, bound to it because there was no other way to accomplish His ends. The same for suffering, couldn’t God, this all-powerful being, teach us whatever He needs to without all the suffering and pain? Again, the answer seems to me to be, of course He could. So, why not?

But here again, these are in a real sense futile thoughts and questions. How can my human intellect even remotely approach an understanding of how the God of the universe functions? What His motives are—if He even has “motives”? Why things are the way they are? Why my wife is still sick? Ultimately, God is far beyond our thoughts and words, beyond, as Aquinas knew, our theology.

I can’t say I’ve ever “felt” the presence of God. I’ve never had an experience like Paul or Pascal’s “Night of Fire.” But what do I know? Maybe I feel the presence of God each day, maybe without that presence I’d be a raving lunatic, incapable of taking care of my wife. Do I really have any idea what the “presence” of God feels like?

For a long time I changed my prayers, only praying for intangibles for my wife, things like strength, courage, patience and fortitude. Of late I’ve gone back to asking God to heal my wife and these prayers have been, at times, contentious. I’ve been angry, frustrated. I’ve yelled at God. Questioned God. But what am I asking? Who am I talking to? Do I even know? C.S. Lewis wrote something that has always stuck with me:

How many hours are in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask—half our great theological and metaphysical problems—are like that.⁶

I would say it’s way more than half. I suspect our prayers are much like that too. Like my friend who confesses his prayers never work, neither do mine, most likely because I have no idea what I’m praying for or what to pray for and I’m too human to see the answers even if God puts them right in front of me.

Back in my twenties there was a joke that went around that I liked:

God is dead. —Nietzsche
Nietzsche is dead. —God

In my circles at the time, attending a Christian college and later teaching at a Christian high school, Nietzsche was a pariah, the man who dared to say that God was dead. The quintessential atheist. After being forced to leave my teaching career (a long story), some years later I entered a graduate program in Literature at San Diego State University and began reading Nietzsche for a paper I had to write. I was astounded to read the “God is Dead” passage in The Gay Science. It was nothing like I expected. As I read it, it seemed to me that Nietzsche, far from celebrating the death of God, was lamenting it, was warning the world about the consequences of believing God was dead. Here’s part of the passage:

Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder?⁷

Walter Kauffman, who translated many of Nietzsche’s works into English, wrote this:

It seems paradoxical that God, if ever he lived, could have died—and the solution is that Nietzsche’s pronouncement does not at all purport to be a dogmatic statement about a supernatural reality: it is a declaration of what he takes to be a historical cultural fact…an attempt at a diagnosis of contemporary civilization, not a metaphysical speculation about ultimate reality.⁸

And this:

…but while he [Nietzsche] was keenly aware of the sense in which the existence of God might diminish the value of man, he was no less aware of, if not altogether overwhelmed by, the manner in which the nonexistence of God would threaten human life with a complete loss of all significance.⁹

The Globalists and elites want a world without God, because they can attempt to replace that vacuum with whatever they want: climate change, progressive activism, infinite scrolling, pornography, corporate culture, whatever. It doesn’t really matter what it is, as long as the general populace is occupied with something that will keep them fearful and pliable, as long as people look to the ruling elite for meaning and solutions—and not to God.

God is their greatest enemy because The State becomes secondary, something that can and should be resisted if necessary. Christians gain wisdom from a higher power and it is a wisdom unlike anything The State has to offer. Those who would enslave us are incapable of understanding why it is so powerful as are those who have relinquished their freedom because of fear and propaganda.

This is one of my wife’s favorite passages from Annie Dillard’s book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

There is not a guarantee in the world. Oh your needs are guaranteed, your needs are absolutely guaranteed by the most stringent of warranties, in the plainest, truest words: knock; seek; find; ask, but you must read the fine print. “Not as the world giveth, give I unto you.” That’s the catch. If you can catch it it will catch you up, aloft, up to any gap at all, and you’ll come back, for you will come back, transformed in a way you may not have bargained for—dribbling and crazed. The waters of separation, however lightly sprinkled, leave indelible stains. Did you think, before you were caught, that you needed, say, life? Do you think you will keep your life, or anything else you love? But no. Your needs are all met. But not as the world giveth. You see the needs of your own spirit met whenever you have asked, and you have learned the outrageous guarantee holds. You see creatures die, and you know you will die. And one day it occurs to you that you must not need life. Obviously. And then you’re gone. You have finally understood that you’re dealing with a maniac.¹⁰

Talking to my wife the other day about this passage, she said she likes to leave off the last sentence, but I like it, because it is the human mind attempting to make sense of God, a human mind reacting to the world in an honest way. It all looks so crazy: wars, famines, rapes, beauty, art, love—it’s all there wrapped up in such a way that trying to make sense of it is often futile—but then you remember: “Not as the world giveth, give I unto you.”

I was thinking the other day about Christ’s words on the cross: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” It had to be a real question, real anguish, a sense of truly feeling deserted by God—a feeling common to any of us who have faced difficult problems and circumstances.

Throughout this journey I’ve been on there was always one Biblical passage that never left me, one passage that helped guide me and still does. Written by Paul, a theologian of sorts, it speaks of something far higher and more important than knowledge or theology: love. I Corinthians 13 is one of the greatest things ever written. At the end of it, Paul writes:

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became an adult, I set aside childish ways. For now we see in a mirror indirectly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I have been fully known. And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.¹¹

It reminds me of Aquinas. We can wrestle with Biblical passages, the nature of God or why there is evil in the world. But we’ll never have definitive answers to most of our questions, nor will our understanding in this life ever be complete, so what matters most? Above faith? Above hope?

Think about that. Above faith. Above hope.

It’s love, which is no easy thing.

Losing my faith a few decades ago was one of the most difficult things I have ever gone through, but I am finding returning to it to be just as difficult, probably more so.

Not by the way of reason, but only by the way of love and of suffering, do we come to the living God, the human God. Reason rather separates us from Him. We cannot first know Him in order that afterwards we may love Him; we must begin by loving Him, long for Him, hungering after Him, before knowing Him. . . For God is indefinable. To seek to define Him is to seek to confine Him within the limits of our mind—that is to say, to kill Him.¹²

I do often wish that God would eradicate evil in the world today, that God answered my prayers in a way that made sense to me, that God stopped rape and murder, that God would heal my wife, in short, that God acted more like I want Him to.

But that’s not how God……….

You can guess how that sentence was going to end in my earlier drafts when I had planned for that to be the last sentence of this essay. But in the editing process I thought it sounded too sure of myself, almost a negation of everything that came before: “Hey, now that I know I’ll never fully understand God, it’s all good!”

But that’s not how it is. It’s a daily struggle. There’s a line in Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” that I’ve always liked:

“She would of been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”¹³

This Christian idea of “dying daily” also applies, I think, to our ideas and conceptions of God. While writing this over the last six months I often began to think it was ready to post—but then I’d read through it and notice something that didn’t seem right. A couple of weeks ago I told my wife I was ready to post it only to realize a few hours later that I needed to change something.

There’s a sense in which our ideas about God are lies, not willful or immoral ones, but words strung together that cannot adequately explain or define God, they always, inevitably, miss their mark. That’s okay—as long as we realize it, as long as we know, truly know, that God is far, far beyond what our minds can conceive.

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.¹⁴

And so my thoughts and ideas about God, like this essay, will always be incomplete, will always be a construction zone.

I’ll leave you with one more quote by Miguel de Unamuno:

And I shall be asked, “What is your religion?” and I shall answer that my religion is to seek truth in life and life in truth, conscious that I shall not find them while I live; my religion is to struggle tirelessly and incessantly with the unknown; my religion is to struggle with God as they say Jacob did from the earliest dawn until nightfall.¹⁵

Amen.

Notes

1. Unamuno, Miguel de, The Tragic Sense of Life, Dover Publications, Inc., New York, N.Y., 1954 (originally published in English in 1921). Translator: J. E. Crawford Flitch. p. 150.

2. Browne, Jackson, "Soldier of Plenty," Lives in the Balance, 1986, Source

3. Unfortunately I don't have the original source for this. I took the quote from an essay I wrote over 30 years ago on my Mac Plus and the old document when converted did not bring the footnotes with it. I can't find this exact quote anywhere else. Grok says it may be a paraphrase.

4. Unfortunately I don't have the original source for this. I took the quote from an essay I wrote over 30 years ago on my Mac Plus and the old document when converted did not bring the footnotes with it. There is a version of this here, but again, I don't know my original source.

5. Merton, Thomas, New Seeds of Contemplation, New Directions Book, 1961 by the Abbey of Gethsemani, Inc. pp. 129.

6. Lewis, C.S., A Grief Observed, Source

7. Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Gay Science, Random House, Inc., 1974, p. 181.

8. Kaufmann, Walter, "The Death of God and the Revaluation," Nietzsche: A Collection of Critical Essays, Robert C. Soloman, editor, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Indiana, 1980, p. 12.

9. Kaufmann, Walter, "The Death of God and the Revaluation," p. 14.

10. Dillard, Annie, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, An American Childhood, The Writing Life, Quality Paperback Book Club, New York, 1990, pp. 269-270

11. New English Translation, Bible Gateway, Source

12. Unamuno, Miguel de, The Tragic Sense of Life, p. 167.

13. O'Connor, Flannery, "A good man is hard to find," Source

14. Isaiah 55:8-9, King James Version

15. Unamuno, Miguel de; "My Religion" in Perplexities and Paradoxes, The Philosophical Library, Inc. F. Hubner & Co., Inc., New York, N.Y., 1945. Translator: Stuart Gross p. 2.