Lightning Bolts

In a conversation today about my spiritual struggles, I heard a concept that I have heard many times before, and it infuriated me. The idea is that if you don't listen to God, he will do something horrible to you to get your attention. Whenever someone's struggling and something awful happens, when their house burns down or their spouse leaves or their child gets hit by a car or their business fails, we say smugly, "Well, I guess God was just trying to get their attention."

I'm sorry, but WHAT THE BLOODY HELL?

I think if God wanted to get my attention, he damn well could have done it some time in the fifteen years that I begged and pleaded for him to hear me, to answer me, to show me what I needed to change in myself so that I could know him better. How about then? Or would that have just been TOO FUCKING EASY?

No more. I tried. For years. And he chose not to answer.

Job rose to the occasion in the face of God's silence and said, "Though he slay me, I will trust in him." My first thought is, "Wow, what faith." My second thought is, "Um ... wait a second, then you'd be dead, so how could you trust him? Does he want you to be dead?" And my third thought is, "Wow ... that is really, really screwed up."

I'm not quite brave enough to shout an anti-prayer to the heavens, but the temptation is there to proclaim that no matter what he does, what blessing or what horror is visited upon me, I will continue without him rather than trying to twist events into divine statements. I heard nothing for too many years to start trying to hear words in the wind now.