The God Habit

I'll cut right to the chase: I'm not sure that I believe in God anymore.

Actually, let me be a little clearer about that. I still believe in God, more or less, but I don't know what in the world God means to me, or if He's what I always believed He was.

I was raised in a Christian home, beginning at age three. I remember when my parents got "saved", not because I was there, but because my mom sat me down and told me about it. She told me about how she and dad had given their lives to God and were going to start taking my brother and me to a place called church. I remember getting dressed up for it, and riding in the back seat of my parents' gold Chevelle to the big stone building. I remember being told over and over that the cardinal rule of church (for a three year old) was being QUIET, and I remember immediately forgetting that cardinal rule when I was led into the big sanctuary with the amazing paintings on the ceilings. I remember being quickly shushed, but I was three, and being shushed didn't dampen my spirits about the wonder of it all.

My parents were-- and are-- excellent Christians. They owned Christian book and gift stores for many years. They are devout, more or less (and I mean that as a compliment-- both the "devout" and the "more or less"). They would be very unhappy to hear what I am about to admit. I'm pretty unhappy about it myself, but that doesn't change it.

I was in church this past Sunday and I was angry. The anger wasn't about anything in particular, really. Over the past several years, I have been increasingly angry at God in general. I think it started back when I tried to attend Zion Bible College (and may that hallowed establishment burn merrily to the ground). Interested readers can explore my history with Zion via my earlier blog on the subject-- frankly, it would greatly illuminate what is yet to come. The point is, I have been God's problem child for years. And the funny bit is, I have no reason to be. God has taken excellent care of me. I am married to the love of my life, I have talents that take care of me financially and give me great pleasure, I have two unbelievably gorgeous and engaging kids, I have experienced a modicum of success in most of the things I have tried my hand at, I am healthy, decent-enough looking, and generally of a happy disposition. I have nothing, really, to complain about.

The problem is that, if these are the ways God has chosen to love me, then He is speaking the wrong language. My love language is not gifts. It is quality time. I like the gifts-- and, in fact, one of the reasons I have been reluctant to talk about this is my fear that God will capriciously yank the gifts away from me out of spite, to "teach me a lesson"-- but the gifts just don't mean love to me the way sensing God's attention and presence and delight in me would. Basically, if I am a little boy and God is my father, he's been one of those fathers who works so long and so often that his kid barely knows what he looks like, but who sends along a lot of gifts to try to make up for that fact.

In short, I'm a whiner. Fine. God isn't the sort of hands-on affectionate father that I want, and I just can't seem to satisfy myself with the distant gift-giver father, especially since even His gift-giving seems so erratic. I mean, what about the much better Christians than myself who haven't gotten anywhere near the blessings I have? How can I even think of my good fortune as God's gifts when they seem, on the macroscopic scale, so random and purely coincedental? Why should I have experienced such blessings, whiner that I am, when so many better people than me have experienced nothing of the kind?

So I was in church and I was angry. I was outright pissed off, and the reason is simple. I didn't want to admit it to myself, but when I finally faced it, I couldn't deny it. I'm mad at God-- furious at him-- because I really value believing in Him, and He has made it almost impossible for me to continue to do so.

It's like this: imagine that when I was young, my Christianity was a grapevine. It sprouted from the ground swiftly, and I was completely assured that it would grow wildly, massively, into a gorgeous vineyard of faith, from which I could press the wine of wisdom and enlightenment. So, to shelter that vine, I built a stone wall around it. For the past thrity years or so, I've been guarding that stone wall, maintaining constant vigilance in defense of it, waiting for it to grow and bloom and bear its limitless fruits. On this past Sunday, I actually opened the door of the stone wall, looked in, and saw something extremely disheartening. The vine hasn't turned into a vineyard. It hasn't grown at all. In fact, it looks more or less dead.

I haven't really talked to God in any meaningful way-- at least regularly-- in years. I do believe in Him, more or less, but I just don't believe anymore that He has the time or the interest to hear my thoughts and concerns. My prayers have never seemed to make any difference to Him, and logically it doesn't make any sense to me that they should. I mean, if God is God, then he knows what needs to happen and is on it already. If He isn't on it, and is waiting for me to let him know what needs to be done, then he can't be God. Right? So what's the point? I expect the pious ones would say, "the point is that prayer brings about a relationship with God", and that's fine and good. I want that-- more desperately than I can express-- and yet prayer seems only to prove the lack of relationship that God wishes to have with me. My prayers go nowhere. There is no response, no difference in any outcomes, not even any sense of some meaningful presence. They are words in a cave, bouncing back as echoes, sounding silly and inane. Completely pointless.

If prayer at least meant that I could sense God listening, and caring-- if prayer ONLY meant proof of the relationship-- then I'd keep it up. It doesn't though. I never made a conscious choice to stop praying, but over the past several years, my silence to God has been the practical result.

So I asked myself, this past Sunday, do I really even believe in God anymore? The answer was, grudgingly (or stubbornly), yes I do. But I don't believe that God is who I always thought he was.

I used to believe that God thought I was special, that he loved me specifically and wanted to spend time with me. I used to believe that prayer made a difference to him, because he cared about us and wanted us to express our wishes and concerns and fears and desires to him, so that we could watch him address them, and thereby show us his love for us. Now, I don't believe those things. I am angry at God because I really, really want to believe them, but I cannot maintain the illusion anymore that my experience with God has borne those beliefs out. It hasn't, and I am too tired of it all to pretend anymore.

I do have one more prayer for God, and he may consider it a constant: prove me wrong. I want to be wrong. I've prayed this prayer before, and I suspect I will pray it until I die. I don't expect anything special to come of it, though. Not because God can't answer, but because, for whatever reason, he chooses not to.

I hope it's good enough to believe that he's out there, because that's all I've got left. Prove me wrong.