I Am Not a Good Person

It's true. And I don't just say that to get a bunch of people to say, "Oh, come on! Of course you are a good person!" I'm not. I do good things, nice things, funny things, helpful things, caring things and even, on occasion, loving things. But I am not a good person. If I were to guess, I'd say I do about 90% of all these good things because I'm lazy. Sometimes I do the good because I'm afraid of something or because I keep hoping that eventually I'll be a good person, but mostly, I'm just lazy. It's never that I am actually Good.

I'm pretty honest. But honestly, that's just because I'm lazy. It's too much work to lie in the first place. It has to be plausible, and you have to tell it with conviction. Once you've sold it, then you have to keep it up. You have to keep track of what you said to whom; you have to be constantly on your guard. Ugh. That's a lot of work. I've also watched enough sitcoms in my life to know that it always ends badly and then there's the work of cleaning up the mess. See, being honest is the easy way out.

Laziness makes me a better parent too. It keeps me from being the sort who hovers; the kind who stays up all night glueing, sewing and nailing the Blue Ribbon Project together. It keeps me from signing my kids up for nine thousand activities. It keeps me from hanging around the soccer field to watch even every practice. Actually, the more I write, the more I realize I might not just be lazy, but selfish too.

I look like I'm a pretty helpful friend. Watch your kid? Sure! Pick up milk for you at the store? Anytime! Bake some food for PT conferences? No problem! But actually, it's all because I know darn well that I'll need someone to watch my kids eventually and pick up some milk for me and I dread the teachers feeling overwhelmed and quitting so I figure we should keep them well fed. See? Selfish.

Here's the point in the blog post where I should be making some witty or wise observation then that extends beyond the story or bits of story that I've just shared. Perhaps there is something spiritual or theological here, but I'd rather not go there. It's too much work and I'm in need of a little "Me time."

The Problem With God

I believe in a big God, a really big God, a God bigger than my imagination, which of course is a logical impossibility because how can you believe in something you can't imagine? I can't take on that conundrum today though.

The trouble with that God, the super incredibly big God, is that to really know him, see him, experience him, you have to stop trying to make your life be safe, risk free and predictable. You never really get to see a Big God when life is smooth, happy and "as planned." You learn About how big God is, how powerful, how loving, how awesome, and you Believe it in those easy times, but you don't Know it, until life gets serious.

When a loss, or even just an unpleasant surprise, comes along and reveals what you claimed to have known all along, that you're not in control of your life, you find out if you really believe it or not. Either God is big, or he's not. Either Jesus is creating and recreating and telling an amazing story of redemption, or he's not. There's no, "Well, in this time and place God is this or Jesus is that." Either all the time, in all the places it's true, or it's not true at all. And the only way to find out if it's true, if Love really wins, is to throw off, let go, be ripped from, all of the safety nets of knowing and controlling what will happen next.

It seems sort of odd to me, but to really be "in the know," you have to actually face the fact that you know nothing. For me, the only way it's going to happen that I admit that I know nothing, is if I have no other choice. And that is the problem with God. To quote CS Lewis, "It's not as if he were a tame lion."

Although, what would be the point if he were?