The
other day I received a text from daughter Tracy that an attempt I had made a
few years ago to answer a question from grandson Carter had failed. She wrote
that Crater wanted to talk to me to answer the question again and that doing so
I had better be on my A-game. The question: Who made God? A-game indeed!
The
truth is, I will fail again if Carter gets me on the phone and asks for an
answer. I believe in God. I believe everything I say about God when I recite
the various creeds, but I have no real understating of what I am saying and no
way of explaining to anyone, let alone myself, what all those words mean. I am
simply a believer. To non-believers I am probably a fool.
God-questions
abound, especially in times like these. Why, for instance, are some infected
and others not even in the same family, let alone why the disease in the first
place, God being all-powerful and thus not preventing it? But then
God-questions have been there ever since humanity began to believe in an all-powerful
God, creator of all that was and is and will be. And non-answers have abounded
as well.
Non-believers,
if I may speak for them, probably believe life is a crap shoot anyway. You get
what you get. You’ll get the virus or you won’t get it, mask or no mask, social
distancing or no social distancing. Life is what it is and life is over when it
is over so enjoy the ride as best as you can. After all, you can still wear the
mask, social distance and behave and still get it, God or no God.
That,
of course, is almost beside the point in trying to answer Carter’s question. My
only answer is to admit that I don’t know the answer to that question just as I
don’t know the answer to so much of what goes on in my life and in the world
around me. Even knowing the answers, even understanding what is happening, does
not make dealing with the reality of life any easier. Life still has to be
lived, answers or no answers, understanding or nor understanding, belief in God
or no belief at all.
I
am thankful that Carter is so inquisitive. My guess is that he will be okay
when I tell him that I don’t know who made God. He’ll go back to working is
puzzles, playing with his computer tablet, reading his books: in other words,
simply being a five-year-old. And I’ll go back, after his conversation, being a
seventy-eight-year-old grandpa doing what my body and mind allow me to do.
That’s all I can do.
That’s
all any one of us can do. We live in the moment, as we always have and always
will, with unanswered questions, strong in our faith, knowing that somehow in
some way we will all get through this as best we can, just as we have gotten
through life so far. And, most of all, we will get through it together, again,
as we always have and as we will always do. Thanks be to the God we believe in
but whom we do not understand.
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