I know a women who believes that her God has been testing her, for most of her life. She also believes that despite everything she goes through, her faith is still strong and true.
She has a son who is in his mid-twenties now, but has been mentally challenged since shortly after birth. The women believes that the condition of her son is one of the biggest tests her God has set for her.
Perhaps you think that I’m insensitive by writing about this? The truth is I feel sad for her son, but I have mixed feelings of pity and loathing for her.
Here we encounter the first horrific reality of a world with a god in it: the women is apparently eminent enough to warrant a God making another human being become the guinea pig in a test of her faith. The obvious conclusion is that this god does not value all human life equally. The obvious question is, by what criteria?
If anyone knows the answer to that question, I’m sure people everywhere who are afflicted by one form or other of physical or mental disability, are waiting to hear it. Yes, I’m talking about God’s pawns, or the world’s human guinea pigs.
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But let us continue. The women lives a reasonably good life, but not everything goes the way she would like. She’s self-employed, has a roof over her head, a decent enough husband, reasonably good food to eat, takes the odd holiday away. By most standards, she’s in a better position than the majority of the world’s population.
However, she has shitty relatives who are constantly fighting each other, business is mostly not that good, she has to skip paying some bills from month to month, she’s frequently sick (her husband too), close friends and family members have died from or are slowly succumbing to cancer, and she just can’t seem to win that Lottery. Worse, her immediate neighbor has just got that new 57 inch flat screen TV and imported Italian tiles in the kitchen, and the idiot across the road drives a super hot top-of-the-range Mercedes, while her husband makes do with that lousy Mazda that forever breaks down.
At these times she complains to anyone that will listen that her god is testing her, but she is confident that she has the strength to abide, and will be rewarded some day.
What she has failed to contemplate is the fact that somewhere in Africa, there is a child who has not eaten for days, using the hot sun and twinkling stars for his roof. This child is not thinking about TV’s and tiles, not even about that unmarked shallow grave that is his destiny. This child is even unaware he is the object of a cruel game in which a God has gone beyond testing, to torturing.
This my friends is the astounding reality of a world with a God in it.
Lenny Says 