Forgiving God

As I grow older, I find great delight in the book of Job.  Delight might be the wrong word, although I do delight in the poetry of the book.  Job reminds me that I am often at my best, most faithful, and most real when I have been stripped of everything. (It probably doesn’t happen often enough.  Not that I’m asking for trouble, but I am like the grandma in Flannery O’Conner’s story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”; I would be a good woman if I had a gun pointed at my head all the time.)

Job finally recognized the eternal searching for answers will lead him nowhere.  I am an Enneagram 5 and I need to remember that.  There is rest and peace when I can put my hand over my mouth and say, “You are God and I am not.”  I can rest in that.  It may feel like I am being passive, but never is my faith more vibrant and alive.

In the book I have been reading by Ronald Rolheiser he says that in growing older one of our tasks as we mature is to forgive God for not rescuing us.  That hit a nerve.  Forgive God?   It’s true.  I want a fairy godmother as much or more than I want God.  It becomes easy for me to question the goodness of God when he doesn’t appear; that he really doesn’t see me or care. When things shouldn’t have happened the way they did or when I wasn’t protected from…whatever.  While I believe on one level that it’s hubris to even think such a thing, on another level I know that forgiveness is part of restoration and to forgive takes the humility of letting go. The real arrogance is to hold on to the idea that we have been let down by God.   That blocks my healing and He desires my healing. 

Being stripped of all my defenses drives me to see God as God and not as my fairygodmother.

God doesn’t need me to forgive Him.  I need me to forgive Him.

Then I can sincerely ask forgiveness for not understanding that I am not God.