7 God Must Be Angry Takes

Last updated on: March 24, 2017 at 9:28 am by Anne Kennedy

7 God Must Be Angry Takes 2017-03-24T09:28:27-04:00 Anne Kennedy

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Can I still be blaming stuff on the time change? Pretty sure I can. Going to anyway.

One
There is literally ice falling from the sky. It’s whacking against my window pane in sharp angular bits. A gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath this is not. Also a deep gray permeates every layer of the landscape, as far the eye can see. I’m not even going to bother trying to find something good about it. Its just very bad. God must be angry about something.

Two
How could he not be. Spent an inordinate amount of time yesterday avoiding ugly things on the Internet. Took me a lot of time and a lot of vigilance. First there was all the stuff to avoid about Russia, and then something about healthcare, and then there was some unpleasantness in London, and then I had to work really hard to avoid some sick stuff about evangelicalism. All of the clicking suddenly away was frankly exhausting, so much so that I finally had to start paying attention to my own children.

Three
So back to the time change. I’ve been really disappointed in 2017 that I actually don’t deal with change as well as I thought I did. I like to think of myself as a flexible fun person, able to take life as it comes, eager and ready to quickly alter my plans and way of thinking to accommodate the changes and chances of each day’s circumstances. But it turns out that I’m really not that kind of person. It takes me a long time to adjust to the idea that in three weeks I might have to do something in a different order, or add something to my day. And even then, when the dreaded moment arrives, I’m not ready for it and therefore spend the next three weeks complaining about ‘what just happened.’

Finding suddenly that the clock says one thing, but my decrepit body says another, and to have that go on day after day ‘living into’ the dissonance has made me think a lot about the changelessness of God. The idea that he wouldn’t be surprised by anything, anything at all, even evil, is a curious proposition.

Four
Someone on twitter was shouting at some other person on twitter about the idea that God might want some of the bad things that are happening to happen. I mean, stands to reason. If a bad thing does happen, God had to allow it, therefore he did want it to happen. (Me and a whole generation of twitter users suddenly feel sorry for dropping Logic 101.) What’s that verse? Did calamity strike the city and I did not bring it about, says the Lord Almighty? I can’t remember the verse. Probably on purpose. But the obvious answer is no. When bad things happen, God accepts the responsibility of having allowed those things.

Want, or Desire, is surely too dangerous a word. Of course, if God is sovereign, which he is, and something does happen, you can look to God then and say, What Gives. Are you literally kidding me O God. How Could You Let This Happen. But he’s not going to say, I let this happen because I really did want all these people to die and all those other people to be humiliated. He’s going to be silent. And later you’re going to be reading Job and those words that God did say–Were you there when the earth was stretched out and given form? Do you really propose to say that you know what I am doing? Who are you, O Man, or Woman, or Whatever to know the purposes of the Almighty? And so you’ll go away more frustrated than ever.

Five
Later though you’ll run up against the cup of God’s wrath towards the end of Isaiah–the foaming wine being poured out and all the nations of the world being forced to drink it down to its very dregs. It’s not exactly a picture of desire. But it’s just. It’s fair. It’s very very fair. Just like all this ice careening from the sky.

Six
I do say ‘you’ a lot when I mean ‘me,’ all the while noticing an increased use of the words ‘we’ and ‘our’ in all the reading I’ve been doing online. ‘We’ should do this or that. ‘Our’ way of being is such and such. We and Our. Us and so on. It’s the obvious way to include someone else in your own thinking, in whatever it is you’re trying to say. If I want you to accept the proposition that I’m putting forth, if I say Us at the moment when I’m going to lay it on thick, like talking about how all humanity sins, I probably do want to say, ‘We all sin and God is just about to strike Us down,’ rather than, ‘You Sinner, God is about to strike You down.’ I mean, I can’t say either of those things because I don’t know what God is about to do.

But as ‘discourse’ becomes more fractured and recriminatory (surely, every single day is Festivus on the Internet) I’m finding the ‘Wes’ and ‘Ours’ more difficult to read past. Almost every sentence I find myself stopping to wonder again who is writing and who I am and if I agree. It makes for interrupted and stilted reading. But maybe that’s not a bad thing. Who knows? Besides God I mean.

Seven
And now I’m sure you’d rather go read more quick takes because this isn’t going to get any more cheerier. Pip pip.

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