Now I know that lots of you can understand that story. Lots of you men believe that God has led you to just the right woman to be your wife, don't you? Men, if you believe that God has led you to just the right person to be your wife, raise your hand. Here is your chance to get on the good side of your wife.
Lots of us believe that God has led us to happy endings for other important stories in our lives. One couple went through a long and torturous process of finding a baby to adopt. But when it was all over, they said they sincerely believed that God had led them to exactly the right baby for them. A person went through a long struggle with a potentially fatal illness and emerged alive and well. He and his whole family are convinced that God has healed him. That is a happy way of thinking.
There is just one problem with it. Some people who have lived through stories that did not have happy endings will want to ask, "Why did God let me down?" There are some people who have lived through some tragedy like the death of a child and have lost faith in God altogether because God did not make everything come out right for them.
All of that raises some questions that really need to be reckoned with. Does God really get involved in the things that are going on in our world and in our lives? If the answer is "Yes," then how does God get involved and how can we work with God so that God will give happy endings to our stories? Those are questions that lots of us want to ask. The answers are not simple.
The basic biblical answer is, "Yes, God does get involved in our lives." The biblical drama tells us about a God who knows and cares what is going on in our lives and in our world and who is at work in the histories of nations and in the lives of people to accomplish God's good purpose.
Of course, most of us know better than to try to turn God into some kind of a Santa Claus who will grant our every wish. A number of years ago, there was a song that had the singer praying, "Oh, Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz?" It was a spoof of course. But it was a spoof making fun of the shallow, selfish piety that some people actually practice. We know better than to try to make God our errand boy to wait upon our trivial desires.
And yet, there are some deep concerns of our lives, the basic loving concerns that represent our best humanity, that we feel we must lift up to God in earnest prayer. Our biblical faith teaches us that God cares about things like that and that God is willing to get involved with us concerning them.
But how does God get involved? Some people believe that God has everything pre--programmed so that everything is going to unfold according to God's plan no matter what anyone does. "What will be will be."
Other people seem to visualize God sitting at some heavenly computer console giving the orders that make everything happen that does happen, both the good things and the bad things. They visualize God interceding and solving our problems with miracles or with rather conspicuously manipulated circumstances. Sometimes the Bible writers give us the impression that God works in some ways like that. Some of them saw it that way. People who think of God in that way often work hard, through prayers and acts of piety, at trying to persuade God to make things come out like they want them to.
On the other hand, many believe that God is simply absent, that God leaves us on our own to solve our own problems and to bear our burdens alone. Every person who has lived through many of the real struggles of life has felt that way at times. Theologians have come to call that experience "the silence of God."
The biblical drama as a whole leads us to look for a different answer to our question. It gives us the impression that life and history are being shaped as they happen, both by the work of God and by the decisions and actions of the people involved. The Bible sometimes speaks of miracles and of divine interventions. But it is clear that those are not the ways in which God usually works. God usually works through the movements of human life and history and the life--shaping interactions between people, especially the loving interactions.
God has to work in many complex and subtle ways in the complex situations of human life, and things cannot always come out like God wants them to. But God is still at work in our world and in our lives.
God has a purpose for the whole creation. That is not to say that God has a detailed plan worked out for each of our lives and that the only way to do what is right is to discover God's plan for us and obey it. But God does have a purpose for each of us. God wants for us what really is the best possible life that we could have, the life of faith and freedom and love. That purpose can be accomplished in many different ways in the lives of different people. God is always at work in God's own ways trying to move us toward the fulfillment of that purpose.
Part of God's purpose for us is for us to be free to participate in the making of the decisions that shape our lives and determine the course of human history. God wants us to have that freedom so that we can use it in love and so that we can freely participate with God in working toward the accomplishment of God's purpose for the creation.
Not everyone who has freedom uses it in love, and even some of those who do use it in love do not always have the wisdom they need to make the right decisions. As a result, lots of things happen that are contrary to what God wants to happen in our lives and in our world. God has to work with that as God continues to work in our lives.
Leslie Weatherhead, the English preacher whose book, The Will Of God,1 has become a classic, speaks of the conditional will of God. There are lots of things that are made necessary by conditions that God did not want to exist. But God is active and decisive even in those difficult and complex situations of life. Many times, we will need to recognize what is the will of God under the circumstances that exist. We will need to learn that our prayers may be answered in terms of the best things that can happen under the circumstances that exist in our lives.
If God is indeed at work for our good in our world and in our lives, how can we relate ourselves to God's loving work in a way that will enable us to receive the blessing God wants to give us? If we are wise, we will seek to discover what God is trying to do in our world and in our lives and then live in a way that will be responsive and obedient to God's purpose. We can become participants in what God is trying to do.
If we read again the story of Abraham's servant who believed that God had given him success, we will discover that the servant undertook his mission in prayer. He very intentionally and earnestly sought and followed the guidance of God. It would probably not be wise for us to set up little techniques for letting God give us the right answers to our questions as Abraham's servant did. But there are other ways in which we can seek the guidance of God and get in harmony with what God is doing in our lives.
The first thing that we need to do is to get to know God. The best way in which we can do that is to study the Bible. The Bible is an accumulation of witnesses given by people who had different kinds of interactions with God. They tell what they have learned about God through their own experiences. They intend to lead us into our own relationships with God so that we can have our own experiences in interaction with God. The most important witnesses are those that tell us about people's experiences with Jesus Christ. Through Jesus, God intentionally made God's self known to us so that we can find our way into relationship with God.
It is best not to read the Bible expecting to find clear--cut, specific answers to your questions about what to do in the particular situations of your life. Life is too complex for that. Read, rather, to come to know God so that you can imagine what God might be doing in your life situation and what God might want to happen. It is not necessary to take a literalistic approach to the Bible to do this. It is helpful to take advantage of the work of the scholars and to balance the witnesses found in some parts of the Bible with those found in others. A lifelong exploration of the witnesses of the Bible writers will help us to discover what we need to know about God. It is important to believe that, when the scriptures are taken as a whole, the living God still speaks to us through the scriptures. It is important to be ready to respond in grateful obedience.
Prayer is also an important part of finding our way into relationship with God. Having learned about God, we must try to find our way into relationship with God. Imagine that the God whom you have discovered through the witnesses of the Bible writers is standing there beside you as you work your way through the puzzling and difficult experiences of your life. The Bible writers tell us that God is indeed there. Then talk with God in whatever way works for you. Learn to live in interaction with God. Even though you know that you cannot always get exactly what you pray for, make your deep concerns known to God, especially your loving concerns for yourself and for others. If you are hurting or anxious or bewildered or afraid, talk it over with God. Learn to be honest with God about the things that are going on in your life. Learn to listen as well as to talk. You will be surprised how much guidance you will get and how often you will eventually be led to the right answers to your deepest questions.
What can you expect to receive from this? It would not be wise always to expect to get what you want. You may be wanting the wrong things, and it would probably not be realistic to expect all of your stories to have happy endings, unless you are able to work with a broad definition of a happy ending. Bad things still happen, and some of them may still happen to you. But working through your experiences and decisions in relationship with God can sometimes keep you from doing some of the stupid things that you might have done if you hadn't checked in with God. You will be less likely to do things that will make matters worse. And if you are indeed working things through in relationship with God, no matter what happens, you will experience a new and better quality of life that will probably be the best life possible for you under the circumstances.
There are many who can give their own witnesses to their experience with God and the blessedness that they experienced.
One of the most impressive witnesses of all times was the Apostle Paul whose witness is included in the Bible itself. Paul had been a rising star among the young men of Israel. Then he had a life--shaping encounter with the risen Christ whose followers he was persecuting. After that experience, Paul moved into a life that was shaped by a dynamic interaction with the living God that just never did stop developing.
Things didn't always work out happily for Paul. Apparently he had some kind of a physical affliction and he prayed repeatedly to have it taken away. But the answer he finally got from God was, "My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness" (2 Corinthians 12:9). Paul suffered many things in his life as a servant of God and he knew that he would die an early death. Yet he believed that he was a winner.
His own spiritual pilgrimage was reflected in what he wrote in the seventh and eighth chapters of his letter to the Romans. The experience began with the deep frustration of his attempts to live a religiously good life. "Wretched man that I am. Who will rescue me from this body of death?" (Romans 7:24). But the witness goes on to tell about a dynamic and never--finished interaction with God the Holy Spirit, an interaction in which God leads him far beyond his own spiritual capacities and promises a fulfillment that he could not yet visualize. His witness ends with the triumphant affirmation, "For I am convinced that [nothing in the whole creation] will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 8:38--39).
There are people in our own day who make similar witnesses. They are all around you.
One woman nearly lost her life in a bout with breast cancer. The treatment left her body changed through surgery and her general health damaged as a result of chemotherapy and radiation treatment. She had to go through some really bad times and she came out physically a weaker person than she went in. But she went through the whole experience in prayer and in relationship with God. She came out grateful to be alive and wiser and stronger in many ways. Her story had a happy ending.
Rabbi Harold Kushner and his wife had to live through the heartbreaking experience of seeing their bright young son progress toward an early death from a condition called progeria, or rapid aging. They learned of his condition when he was three years old. They loved him through the experiences of suffering until he died at the age of fourteen. They experienced the anger at the injustice of his suffering and the self--blame and the great variety of other painful emotions that go with such tragedies. They made no pretense about what was happening. Something bad and unjust was happening, something that called into question all of their beliefs about God and about life. But, in time, they were able to work their way through the experience in faith. Rabbi Kushner was able to write the book, When Bad Things Happen To Good People,2 that has been a best seller among Christians as well as Jews and has helped many people to cope with the suffering and injustice they have encountered in their lives.
God does know and care what is going on in our world and in our lives. God is at work in our lives for our good. If we learn to live in responsiveness to what God is doing in our lives, we will reap the benefits of blessedness. We may need a bigger definition of a happy ending than we have usually worked with in the past. But if we can come up with that bigger definition, God can lead us to more happy endings than we can imagine.
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1. Leslie Weatherhead, The Will Of God (Nashville: Abingdon, 1944).
2. Harold S. Kushner, When Bad Things Happen To Good People (New York: Avon Books, 1981).
