Patrick Butler: Another Look

So often it seems we Americans try to fit God into our schedules, rather than the other way around.

I had this thought at a weekend service I visited not too long ago. The speaker, I thought, tried to convince people that God was worth “taking along” into their daily lives. I couldn’t help wonder why anyone would be in the room if they were having second thoughts about changing their path to accommodate God. What would be the point?

In general the drumbeat of our culture seems to relentlessly drive us on a daily basis. While there is nothing wrong with meeting a schedule, there is something wrong with expecting or, even by default demanding, that God fit into it. It’s too easy to construct a lifestyle around personal desires and ask God to achieve it. That leaves out an important aspect of God all religion addresses — what does God really want?

This latter concept is a heady thing. And once you get into it, there’s no stopping it. Perhaps many people know this intuitively and stay far away from religion.

The reason this thought is important to consider is that our culture needs fixing. Everyone seems to know it. Everyone can point out something that is wrong with, well, life.

And if there is a God, then how does God want us to fix the culture? Maybe, just maybe, it’s our very desires getting in the way of the fix that’s needed. Maybe it’s not the desires we have, but the way we go about fulfilling them that’s the problem. Methods betray ulterior motivations.

Perhaps it’s neither, but timing is the issue. Some goals require maturity, insight and depth of wisdom. A man once told me, “The greater someone’s effectiveness, the longer the apprenticeship.” But who wants to wait anymore? But what if that’s a condition to “release” into a greater effectiveness?

And if God-believers desire to fix a broken culture — which a lot of them do around Smith County — they have a vested interest in not doing things the way they’ve been done before. Someone said the definition of insanity is to do something repeatedly and expect a different result.

So wouldn’t that change look more like convincing God to take us along on His schedule, rather than the other way around? This is why I like the Jewish idea at Yom Kippur.

I’ve spoken with plenty of atheists who think God is fantasy and their fellow citizens are crazy at best to entertain outlandish notions such as “divine intelligence.” There are God-believers who acrimoniously feel the same way about atheists’ “intelligence.” Let’s all do coffee together sometime and calm down.

But speaking of self-described atheists — and the number of them is growing in America — I saw a bumper sticker recently that said, “In the absence of God, anything is permissible.”

It’s difficult to fix a broken society with such concepts, is it not?

That bumper sticker is a message to those self-described atheists or agnostics, but it seems many God-believers have latched onto part of it as well.

Maybe that’s why so many believers find themselves in such a debilitating and anxiety-driven hurry so often. I call it the “Beer commercial” view of life after the 1970s beer campaign “You only go around once in life. You gotta grab for all the gusto you can.”

And weekend meetings become more of mandate to mesh God into the fabric of our erroneous energy expenditures. Why should God do that? How are God-believers any different from those whose ultimate aim is self-actualization through the focused pursuit of their own desires? I’ve had otherwise astute people honestly ask me, “well, what else is there?”

Grabbing for the gusto, or “grabbing” anything for that matter, seems like a sure-fire method of latching onto the wrong thing, at the wrong time, in the wrong way, with the wrong motivation with the wrong result. I advise against it.

Take another look; If there is a God, shouldn’t people stop what they’re doing and “find” this eternal wisdom that means so much to us all? Everyone can use a fresh look at God, evidently once a week at the very least, so there’s no pointing of fingers here.

If there is no God, then have a nice day and hope for the best. That’s about all you can do about life and good luck at it. But is there any reason for those who believe in God to do the same?

Patrick Butler
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