Spiritual Hiccups - God, I Need You

When a toddler at the playground falls and skins a knee, there's often a brief moment of stunned silence followed by cries and screams.  This normally produces a swift parental response as Mom or Dad swoops in to help the child and makes things all better.  Indeed most of would be appalled if a parent failed to act this way.  It is simply how things are supposed to be.  A parent should care for a child in need or distress.  That's a parent's job.

Given how common Father language is when talking about God, it's not surprising that some parental expectations get transferred onto God.  I've even heard a few folks go so far as to say, "It's God's job to help me out, to do stuff for me."  And I once read where someone said, "God has to forgive me.  That's his job."

I have to admit to falling into such feeling myself at times.  Some of my biggest faith struggles arise when I don't think God is being attentive enough to me, when God isn't responding to me as I would like.  But every once in a while, I remember that God acts the parent is not because God has to, but because God chooses to. 

If you read the Noah stories in Genesis, the whole human enterprise seems to be a failure, one that God seriously considers erasing and then starting over with a clean slate.  But for some inexplicable reason, God decides to commit to humanity.  It's not God's job, and God doesn't have to.  But there is something about God's nature - perhaps the God is love part - that compels God to stick with us.

And so the psalmist can cry out,
   Hear my prayer, O LORD;
         let my cry come to you.
   Do not hide your face from me
         in the day of my distress.
   Incline your ear to me;
         answer me speedily in the day when I call.

Even though the psalmist knows that his days are "like an evening shadow;" that he will "wither away like grass," while God's "name endures to all generations, still he can say to God, "You will rise up and have compassion on Zion."

In this time of year with all its gifts and presents, we may do well to occasionally recall what a gift it is that God is mindful of us, that God doesn't simply leave us on our own.  That God loves us, comes to us, and becomes our Parent when God does not have to, might just be the most amazing gift of all.

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