In our age, one might think the problem of suffering is the hardest thing to understand and make peace with. Not for me. For me there is another problem that is even harder to get my head around: how to cooperate effectively with God — how to recognize His will.
In the Gospels, the Lord Jesus warns in several places that one should carefully count the cost before deciding to follow Him, for “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.” And indeed, in my experience, it is quite a ride. Coming from a non-believing family, I have some basis for comparison. In my life there sometimes seem to be more twists and turns in a single month than some of my relatives go through in a decade — and this while they are actively trying to live life to the fullest. I, on the other hand, try to keep my life as boring as possible, with as few changes and as little adrenaline as I can manage. Yet what I always end up with is uncertainty, volatility, and the need to make one consequential decision after another — very often affecting my wife, my kids, and others too.
In the society where I live, it is common to pay to make one’s life less monotonous. I would gladly pay to make mine as monotonous as possible — to buy a kind of insurance against chaos. Yet here we are, right back at the problem I outlined at the beginning. One would gladly hedge against all sorts of risks, but how does one do so without also hedging against God’s nonexistence? That is the one thing I cannot do, though nonbelievers can. For them there is no God, and so they can keep insuring themselves all the way down into a monotonous paradise of boredom — one where the valve of adventure stays firmly in their own hands, ready to be opened during the holidays. That is, at least, until an illness comes, or a disaster, or an economic crash — or, even more often, until they manufacture some artificial drama around which they can begin to feel bitterness and resentment, and nurse their grudges.
I often pray that God will keep these surrogate problems and this surrogate suffering away from us. And indeed, they rarely do strike us. For if you decide to follow the Lord Jesus, and you genuinely try to, real problems and real suffering tend to arrive long before any surrogate ones can take hold. But am I actually following God’s will — or am I just being irrational and delusional, incredibly lucky for now, with doom looming over me? Frankly, I am far from certain. Here is what I do:
Firstly, I gave up any ambitions of my own long ago. I look around and search for efforts that feel good, purposeful, and legitimate — things that make sense and that, if they were to come to fruition, would surely please God, according to what we know about Him.
Secondly, there are incredibly many such things around me, and I cannot spend time with each and every one of them. And spending too little time on something can often hurt more than spending none at all. I am also not gifted enough to do just anything, so I choose carefully, according to my gifts.
But that still leaves me with too many things to choose from. This is where I become attentive to various signs. Sometimes they take the form of strange coincidences, often what feel like God’s little jokes: I might be thinking intently about something as I walk down a street, weighing two options, when around the corner comes some completely unrelated advertising banner saying “Take option B”. Or I am actively considering joining some effort when a person I haven’t heard from in ten years calls me at that very moment and, as an odd little aside to the otherwise mundane purpose of the call, suggests I should never get involved in such things.
One sign like that is usually not enough for me, but when several come together, I weigh whether it is possible for me to change course — whether, with a bit of luck, I could reorganize things in my life to make the new thing fit. Of course, it is always far from a sure bet; but if this is what God wants — and since He frequently makes these odd little tweaks here and there — I tend to believe He will help. Because very often, for ordinary things, no great miracle is necessary.
Standing before such a decision — usually a small one, but sometimes a big one — I always have to weigh the possibility that I am mistaken, that I have misread the signs. And most of all, I know quite well how I would proceed if I thought there were no God at all. If there were no God, I would simply seek external confirmation for what I inwardly long to do anyway. But unmistakably, making the new thing fit always leads me out of my comfort zone; it goes against what I would naturally want. It brings uncertainty and volatility, and exposes my life to unnecessary risk.
To be honest, I have to confess that I have a tendency to hedge against this risk. But then I ask myself whether I am not, in fact, hedging against God’s nonexistence.
In a similar way, one could hedge against the fallibility of the Bible — the most significant source of knowledge about who God is. And it is really one and the same question, since what matters is not so much whether God exists, but rather whether God is who the Bible claims Him to be. If the Lord Jesus were not God, there would be no point in living the way Catholic Christians strive to live.
This is what I pray I never do:
I pray I never start insuring myself against God’s nonexistence.
On its face, the previous sentence may not sound like anything too serious. But in fact — read it again — behold, this is the very definition of atheism. An atheist is a person who insures himself against the possibility that the Lord Jesus is not God. Is it not incredibly serious how near each and every one of us stands to unbelief? It seems quite possible to me that many who declare themselves Catholic Christians are in fact Catholic atheists.
This is not just intellectual theorizing. It shapes your everyday decisions, and it shows plainly in how you live — hard to hide from anyone who happens to take a look. Either you are a Christian, or you merely assent to Christian values.
But if following God’s will were so simple, I would not have begun this article by saying it’s a problem I still can’t quite get my head around. The real difficulties become more apparent when you let other people into the picture.
It has happened to me several times that I started doing a good, purposeful, and legitimate thing after receiving multiple signs. I started — and I saw the effort utterly fail. I never quite doubted God’s existence in such situations, but that is only because it makes no sense for me to live in a world where the Lord Jesus is not God. Yet assuming He is the God we know from the Gospel, the one who would not lead us astray — how is it that He cannot quite protect His plan? Or at least His plan A? How is it that what appears to be a straight line, shining bright white, so often never quite materializes, and what comes instead seems like a more toned-down plan B? In fact, my life as a whole seems a lot like a toned-down plan B. And reading the Bible, I can’t help but feel that what I hear narrated is yet another plan B for mankind — one aggregated out of countless individual plan Bs.
The only explanation, of course, is that it's so often plan B because we refuse to cooperate with God, and He never overrides our free will. And that may, of course, sometimes include me — although I would never knowingly go against God once I felt I had discerned His will. Well, Pharaoh in the book of Exodus did — and it has sown confusion ever since. So unlikely his case seems.
But that is still the more understandable side of the equation. Harder is to imagine that it's the other person. For I have seen many times that I judged God's will quite differently than my peers did. Yet it feels equally unacceptable to think they were all Christian impostors, or that they were all led astray, reaching a different conclusion — one that doomed the shared effort, God's plan A. Even this second possibility, that sincere people are led astray, is hard to imagine. It's hard to believe that God, given our honest effort, would let us go astray.
And that is a question I sadly cannot answer.
But what I do almost every time is hedge against other people’s insincerity: I always keep a plan B in my pocket, so that the efforts toward a good thing would never come to nothing. In the past I doubted whether such a strategy could even be deemed morally acceptable. But the older I get, the more it seems to me there is nothing wrong with keeping a plan B in your pocket — since it seems God Himself may do the same.
If a man can aspire to become God’s tool, plan B may be a part of that. Anyway, it’s something quite different from trying to insure oneself against God’s nonexistence.