one in a million

On Sunday evening I had a ‘moment’. I have already mentioned it on Facebook so if you read that you can skip this bit although I have filled in a little of the detail…

It was midnight. I was getting ready for bed. I was trying to raise the blind in our bathroom so I could get to the toothbrushes on the window ledge but pulled the cord the wrong way. The blind came down instead of up and knocked over the toothbrush holder. The toothbrush holder fell into the open toilet that I was about to shut. The toothbrush holder was ceramic and smashed into loads of small pieces at bottom of the loo. Thankfully most of the toothbrushes fell onto the floor, but mine fell into the loo too. I have described it as a shot in a million. I would have preferred one of the other 999,999 possible shots which did not result in that carnage. I had to fish the broken fragments of toothbrush holder from the bottom of the (thankfully already flushed) loo. All of this happened when I was bleary-eyed and not at my best.

I wanted to blame someone else for these events. I wanted to blame whoever lowered the blind meaning that I had to raise it. I wanted to blame whoever had left the toothbrush holder on the edge of the ledge. I wanted to blame the person who designed our bathroom and placed the toilet so close to the window ledge. I wanted to blame whoever designed the blind so that it could be lowered when I wanted to raise it. I wanted to blame the person who made a ceramic toothbrush holder that would smash into tiny pieces when it fell into the bottom of a toilet. I wanted to blame the people who had made my toothbrush without installing the anti-toilet shield that the others seem to have had. I wanted to blame God for allowing it all to happen.

That last reaction is one that many people have when things go wrong. When their travel plans are disrupted by snowfall: why did God let that happen? When they fall and injure themselves: why did God let that happen? When people they love fall ill or die: why did God let that happen? When they lose their job: why did God let that happen? And so on…

It seems to me that this is rather unfair on God. Firstly because it assumes that we have the right for nothing bad to happen to us. Does that mean it should happen to someone else instead? Or should God wrap all of us in cotton wool so that nothing bad ever happens to us? The first option is simply childish and selfish. The second would mean that we would never take responsibility for any of our actions if there were no consequences to them. It would lead to a form of moral anarchy.

The second reason it is unfair is that it ignores God’s influence already. Are we as ready to thank God and give him the credit for the good stuff in our lives or do we only gripe at him when it goes wrong? We need to be consistent if that is our theological stance on God’s involvement in the world.

Thirdly it reveals a naivete in our understanding of God’s involvement in his world. I am not someone who believes that God is spending his time providing parking spaces for my convenience. I believe that he is active in his world. We cannot know what he restrains and prevents (because it does not happen so we don’t know it didn’t happen); nor can we know how things would be different if God was absent. But we do know that God responds to prayers – ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘maybe’, ‘not yet’, ‘how about this instead?’ and other answers are available to us if we pray with an open mind.

God is not remote. Jesus is known as ‘Immanuel’ (God with us) for a reason. In the words of ‘Once in Royal David’s city’:

And he shares when we are glad.