The Perfect Impossibility

Want to talk about something that's really an impossible mission? How about figuring out what God is up to.

We've all been there. Whether it be the little, almost meaningless things that still get under my skin, like how my dutiful and studious efforts to select the optimal fantasy football roster still blow up in my face...or the big things, like why a loved one would get cancer, why poor children around the world are going hungry, why a certain politician is allowed to remain in office, or why my wheels of purpose in life seem to spin in the mud...So many issues find me staring up at the sky, asking God: 

"What are you up to??" 

A passage of Scripture I bumped into the other day really made me sit back and think about this tendency to strive for figuring God out. It was Ecclesiastes 11:5. Check it out:

"As you do not know the path of the wind, or how the body is formed in a mother's womb, so you cannot understand the work of God, the Maker of all things."

I don't think this crazed desire to have God and his "work" all figured out is anything new. Many of the oldest philosophical works delve deeply into the heart of logic, trying to apply paradigms onto the divine that mankind has established which allow us to make sense of the world around us. There seems to be certain categories of things that science can explain, or other patterns that math or reasoning can rationalize or justify. 

But God is in a category all his own, isn't he? He really is. Sometimes we explain things going differently than we'd expect with light-hearted sayings like "God must have a sense of humor." Sometimes we get downright miffed about things. Other times a person may find him or herself at the winter of their lifetime, looking back across decades of being upset at God all over a single event that shook their trust in him simply because it couldn't be understood. 

The writer of this passage in Ecclesiastes was told by God himself to write these exact words so there'd be no uncertainty. There are just some things we're not meant to understand. By God's grace it's been made perfectly clear what we can understand about his plan to save us by orchestrating human history to create a time when it would be right for his son to come to Earth as Jesus Christ, become our substitute, and die in our place and rise to defeat sin and death. Aside from that, how he operates is really quite a mystery. 

Well, that's not entirely true. There are other principles about God and how he works that we find ourselves being educated on by Sunday morning sermons in church. And those lessons are to be taken seriously. But still, sometimes we just can't know why God did this, or allowed that to happen, or did this thing over here when normally one would assume he'd do that over there instead. 

Why do we try so hard to make sense of every last little thing? There's really nothing we human beings don't want to have figured out, is there? It's even worse with how we view God. We demand answers and explanations. We claim to have him or his behavior defined completely, and then when he breaks our mold, or goes beyond what we can fathom, it perturbs us. Why?

I personally think it's a couple traits in action, possibly simultaneously in some cases. 

First of all, there's PRIDE. We are some seriously egotistical people. Especially nowadays in the 21st century, when so much of the prevailing philosophy of the times indoctrinates us with ubiquitous materialism, antsy instant gratification, and entitlement. 

We want it all, we want it now, and it's because WE DESERVE IT, doggone it!

The discussion of what's wrong with this hubris, as it's long been called, is deep enough for another time. The fact is, simply put, that it's flat out wrong. It's very near-sighted and narrow-minded. It's full of self and no one else, and definitely devoid of God, our heavenly father who has in mind the temporal wellbeing and eternal destiny of each of the 7.13 billion people (give or take) currently living on the planet. When you put it into perspective that way, the relevance of a single event, even as severe as contracting a terminal illness, for the life of just one person, is miniscule in relation to the grander scale of Earth's population. As for something like my fantasy football week not going my way? Well, we won't even go there....

Then there's another factor, FEAR. We simply lack the composure to let some things go on unexplained. We are terrified of not being able to account for all the ramifications of an event, an issue, a change, a loss, an occurrence, a lingering question that seems to be bound for finding no resolution. We can't handle the thought of not knowing why God operates as he does sometimes. 

But trust, as in faith, in our amazing God, is two things:

It's necessary, and it's beautiful. 

It's necessary because, well, as that Scripture passage's author points out, "...you CANNOT understand the work of God, the Maker of all things." It just ain't happening. Just as impossible as it is for us to truly explain, much less comprehend, the miracle of conception of life in the womb, and just as impossible to predict perfectly how the wind and weather will behave - c'mon, meterologists, you know what I'm talking about - so is it with having God pegged. 

And really, why should we? We are, after all, the creation. Not the creator. How could the minds of the beings who were fashioned from the boundless creative genius of an all powerful, divine craftsman POSSIBLY exist on the same par with that Creator's mind and consciousness? That really wouldn't make sense, actually. 

As I said, it's also a beautiful thing to trust God too. Trust without the explanation is something God craves for us to have, as part of the loving relationship he drew up for us and him. He wants us to see him as an infinitely more perfect father than the Earthly ones we all have had, whom many of us have been able to trust fairly blindly because we knew their love, and we loved them in return. The vibrant examples of followers and believers in God who simply fall back and expect God to catch them because of that loving trust, and assured affection, lend themselves as beautiful models for those of us who long for a peace of mind that only those trusting ones understand. 

It's the effortless, fluid, artful image of a dancing partner knowing the other understands the moves to be made, and knowing that the footsteps will fall where they ought, and trusting that when it's time to be twirled in the air, they will be caught and spun on into the next delightful dance move. 

The biggest challenge of faith, that can engender this trust without explanations, might just be a letting go. It's a not-needing-to-know. It's recognition that he's told us, in passages like Ecclesiastes 11:5, "My son, my daughter, you just aren't going to be able to know. You won't be able to understand it. You're not meant to. You're meant to have faith in me, and watch me work."

This is a humbling idea, and an often times abrasive one for very natural parts of our human fabric. But faith is meant to transcend the frailties and shortcomings of what human nature has been ever since the Fall into sin. It's an opportunity to lay down pride, and to push past fear. It's meant to be a confidence that no matter how crazy, or scary, the dance moves, we WILL be caught, and the beautiful dance will go on perfectly. 

This isn't an impossible mission to trust God. With faith, it's all very possible....because with God, all things ARE possible.