I Believe in Santa Claus

Like many other Christians, I have a deep and abiding faith in Santa Claus.

I call him God, of course, and He is the God of promises. "Take delight in the Lord and he will give to you the desires of your heart." "Do not worry about what you will eat and drink and what you will wear, because the gentiles run after these things and your heavenly Father knows you need them." "The young lions suffer want and hunger, but those who seek the Lord lack no good thing." And on and on.

Read these promises for a while and you'll question God's providence when you can't find a parking space.

Promises lead to expectations that, I'm here to tell you, are inaccurate. There are times when God simply does not live up to them. God does not always come to the rescue, and certainly not always in a timely way. Even though God implies that he always provides. If there are exceptions to the rule, there is no rule.

Take now, for instance. We're both still jobless. God hasn't done anything I can see, and he hasn't said anything I've heard.

I have to be careful, though, about sharing the situation with fellow Christians. It upsets them.

You see, they believe in Santa Claus too. They're terrified that God might let the same bad fortune happen to them, so they'll metaphorically hold up a cross between them and you. They need to explain your difficulties away so that they have some sense of control over the future.

You must have done something wrong, because only the sinful suffer. Only somebody else. And then they'll recommit to Godly behavior so they won't be that somebody else. The fact that Jesus shredded the you're-suffering-for-your-sins argument when he healed a man who couldn't walk—the one by the pool of Siloam—doesn't seem to matter.

But enough of fellow Christians. They're only human. What's really troublesome is making sense of God.


Prayer: "I'll have what she's having."

Most of our prayers are ludicrous. We speed over the praise, confession, and thank-you parts of prayer to get to the requests, and then half of our requests are based on keeping up with the Joneses.

That is, first we pray to save ourselves/our friends/our family from disaster and pain. Then we ask for something better than what we have. Better relationships, shoes that fit, fair treatment, acceptance to the right school or clique or club. Okay, and material things too sometimes.

Nothing is wrong with asking for those things. The point I'm trying to make is that our ideas on what to pray for aren't usually very creative.

You get the idea that your friend shouldn't suffer from unrelenting, chronic pain, because most people don't. You're indignant to be underemployed. That knucklehead over there has a better job than you. You should be able to have children because everybody has the right to have children. Your friend shouldn't have died young. Or whatever.

It's all based on the sense that life ought to be fair. But can you draw up a scale that weighs your weird-looking nose against that guy's Down's Syndrome? I didn't think so.

Still, you're indignant that God doesn't do one thing or another because--well, because you believe that God ought to make life fair, or at least more fair. So you try to take the moral high ground; you tell God that treating people the same is fair, and fairness is morally right. You shake your index finger at God. (I hope you're not in public when you do this.)

Next, you argue that since you're one of God's children, God can be more fair to you than those Zoroastrians one street over. He really ought to play favorites, seeing as you have a relationship with him. Good luck winning that argument.

Thing is, you have a narrowed-down version of what's appropriate to ask, and there is no narrowed-down version for a mind as big as God's.

Personally, I'm just fine with my narrowed-down point of view. I'm fine if God only gives me what I want. But God isn't okay with that.


Buy the field. Heck, buy the farm!

Unfortunately, it's my own mind I have to live in. That's why God is troublesome when we're suffering. So, if you're me, you come up with ideas like these:

Reason this is happening #1: God doesn't exist.

I mention the God-isn't-there argument first because I want it out of the way. Fortunately for me, I've been acquainted with God enough to know he exists. Otherwise, it'd be as if each life experience was a daisy petal and I was playing "He loves me, he loves me not" for keeps. Talk about a nightmare. But I believe. So blessed, I can move on to other nightmares.*

Reason this is happening #2: God is a creep.

There you are struck down by suffering, lying there hoping for a Good Samaritan, and you feel like God's stepping over you on his way to Starbucks. You say, "Wha....?! Don't we have some kind of a contract…?" This is another offshoot of thinking God is Santa Claus--thinking that he owes you specific things.

It's also the argument Mark Twain used when he said that God loves humanity so much that he created the house fly. House flies are annoying and they spread disease and so forth. No just being would create one, according to Twain.

God isn't a two-faced creature like Janus. He's separate from evil. That's the deal. It's another statement that's unprovable. I don't have a terrific grasp of the theology. Fortunately for me, I'm able to take it on faith, again because of personal experience.

Reason this is happening #3: God is out to get you.

This one's for real. God's trying to get you to do something you need to do but don't want to. This was Jonah's problem. Whatever you think about whether it really happened is irrelevant--the point of the story is that he was trying to run away from something God wanted him to do.

I've had this happen a few times. I've written blog posts about it. It's not any fun at all, but generally you have some inkling of what he's after you for. Usually.

That leaves the question: why did God represent himself as such a good and giving being, when in fact, he's more into, like, tough love?** Guess what? That question is a lot easier to handle than the next argument:

Reason this is happening #4: There is no reason.

Here's where faith becomes a big, big benefit. You have to believe that God isn't throwing your life away. There is a purpose to what's happening whether you see it or not.

The ultimate example of this is the Holocaust. I think there wouldn't be an Israel now if there hadn't been a Holocaust. I hesitate to throw this example into a mere blog post because there's no comparison, sizewise, to any ordinary life like mine. Not to mention that I have no direct connection to it. Still, it's the most clear-cut cause-and-effect example I can think of.

There was a reason that horrible thing happened, but God didn't give people the opportunity to duck out of the pain—didn't give them the opportunity to let him down. This is the gold standard of faith. Anyone who came through that with faith intact is just awesome.

Frankly, this scares the h*** out of me. After all, the theology is that Christians are grafted on to the tree whose roots are Judaism. Meaning that the same thing could happen to me.

Suppose you're being asked for an inexplicable, major sacrifice? There'd be a sense of betrayal. If you'd known God was going to do this to you, you'd have edged quietly away when you had the chance. And why? Because most of us haven't gotten a really good sense of the character of God—that is, the "pearl of great price" Jesus was talking about.

Here's the story: Jesus said that just knowing God is as beautiful and valuable as a pearl of great price (that's the drift, anyhow). He says if you know there's a pearl of great price hidden in a field, you sell all you have and buy the field so you can have the pearl.

But what if you sold everything you have for a pearl you've never seen? I think it's kind of harsh to blame people for lack of zeal if they haven't gotten a decent look at God.

This is the place a lot of people are in. That's why there are so many mainstream churches with pews full of people who are wondering why in the Sam Hill they're sitting there. They don't know what God is about, so they go for the next best goal: ethics. They work on figuring out what's Good, then help each other live a good life.

A lot of other not-sure-I-believers try to hitch a wagon onto people who do have a good sense of God. I think that happens a lot in evangelical and pentacostal churches. It certainly accounts for the emotion-inducing style of music, with the repetitive lyrics so you can close your eyes and sing while you sway. Together, you feel better.

Fact is, faith doesn't come cheap. Put it this way: God's not asking us to sell everything to buy the field that has the pearl of great price. He wants us to buy the farm.

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*BTW, I get a kick out of the term used for this branch of theology—that is, addressing the question of whether God exists. It's "apologetics." As in, well, yeah, faced with pain on earth, I'm here to apologize on behalf of God. Get me in a giggle mood it'll still crack me up.
**Tough love is a 70s term, but I don't know the 21nd century equivalent.