Getting mad at God

Course correction

I'm a book-a-holic and whether I'm in Lectoure or Edinburgh, in both places I love being a member of a Book Group. I'm a bit of an absentee member in Edinburgh as the meetings rarely coincide with our spells in Scotland, but I appreciate being kept up with the book choices by email and try to read along where I can. The most recent choice for the Edinburgh group, which is affiliated to St Mary's Anglican Cathedral, was the Archbishop of Canterbury's Lent book for 2011, 'Barefoot Disciple' by Stephen Cherry. It's a 'bite off in small chunks and digest slowly' kind of book, so over the past week I've been taking a small bite each morning. It's proving to be a real course correction exercise for me, helping me to face up to the fact that, increasingly, over the past few months, I've been getting mad with God.

A visit to the dentist

I don't mean mad about tsunamis and earthquakes, world hunger and terrible injustice. I get mad for different reasons about these things, but I don't necessarily lay the blame at God's door. But I realise I am resentful about what I perceive as God thwarting me in my attempts to achieve my writing goals. Written down, that looks incredibly lame and on the scale of world suffering it is, but it seems a writer needs an agent if they're to make real progress in their career and over the past few years, I've experienced the slow drip, drip discouragement of rejection from literary agents, or (and in some ways, this is worse) the excitement of an agent showing interest, the feeling of taxiing down the runway at last, only to have take-off aborted, followed by return to another long wait in the departure lounge. 'Tell me about it' will be the cry of so many fellow writers, 'been there, done that, got the tee-shirt', so I'm not pretending that my chapter of set-backs and disappointments is in any way unique, but it is unique to me. I've experienced far graver personal and family problems in my life and I'm thankful that God has faithfully brought me through them all, but this particular experience is like nagging tooth-ache; it's always there in the background, not life threatening but a niggling ache that wheedles its way into everything I do. So Stephen Cherry's book feels like a long-overdue visit to the dentist.

A tumble down the cellar stairs

His book is about humility and is based on the premise that if we seek humility, we've failed at the first hurdle, because to pride yourself on being humble is an obvious contradiction in terms. At the beginning of his book, he describes an accidental tumble down a cellar staircase, and the ensuing bruises to his body and his pride. He then goes on to say:

I suspect that most genuine growth in humility is not sought. Rather we find it coming to meet us as we discover that our preferred way (the way of self-confidence, self-achievement, self-justification, self-admiration, self-consciousness, in fact self-everything) starts to go wrong. Most people will be spared a tumble down a long staircase, but they will experience something like it. That is, they will not seek the lowest place, but they will find the lowest place coming to meet them with a wallop.

In common with most of the human race, I would never aspire to the lowest place and I'm certainly not advocating lack of ambition. But I'm beginning to see the frustrations of the past few years from a different perspective, as a means of giving me something far more valuable than a publisher's contract (although that would also be nice!).
'And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me.' Luke 7:23

Are you offended with God for some reason? Do you see life in those terms or do you approach setbacks differently?