Why God?! Why?!
One of the traps we all fall into is trying to get life right. There are a whole lot of shoulds in a miserable person’s life. I should’ve done this or I should’ve done that or my life should be better or different or easier. Should (see, there it is again!) we all try to be decent human beings? Sure, yes, of course. Are we all going to make mistakes? Most definitely. Is anyone living a perfect life? Nope, not a single person on the planet. And the people who are acting like their lives are perfect are big ole liars trying to make money off making the rest of us miserable (sometimes my cynicism barely even qualifies as dormant).
The crux of the issue, in my view, is the amount of self-flagellation we do after we make a mistake. Are we kind to ourselves? Do we blame ourselves as terrible people (which is a permanent condition) or do we accept responsibility in the moment while protecting our own self-esteem (a temporary circumstance)? Do we feel guilt and frustration and shame for days, weeks, months, even years afterward?
One of the many benefits to having faith or believing in Good (or God) is that the further into faith you get, the more hilarious, externalized, and temporary the problems you encounter. Sometimes, when something really irritating comes up, I am literally yelling and laughing at God in my car on my drive to work or while running errands (if it’s not already clear, I do some of my best machinating in the car). Hopefully to the outside world it looks like I am just singing along to some death metal rather than actually ranting at God, but also who cares what anyone else thinks? The point is that sometimes God (or Good) is a wonderful scapegoat.
Now, am I suggesting that we never take responsibility for the mistakes we make, keep making them, and then say, oops, God made me do it!? Absolutely not. But I do think that people without faith can feel absolutely alone in the world, and that’s a heavy burden to carry on good days and bad. When something goes wrong in our lives and we’ve cultivated a little faith in Good (or God), we can take a breath and contemplate whether this crisis, disaster, or irritation actually has some value and may actually, someday, be better for us in the long run.
We can accept the choices that brought us to that point without so much doom and gloom about the future, because the future is still bright with Good at our side. We can shake our fists at the Universe but do it with an eye roll or maybe even a smile, as opposed to while in the midst of an epic meltdown. There’s just a little more hope and open-mindedness to keep us buoyant and optimistic, if we believe that Good (or God) has a hand in our current circumstances, no matter how bleak. And we can hope that God (or Good) may even have better in store for us in the future and, even more importantly, believe we are worthy of it.