Leaving God at the farm

The Old Testament portion of the Bible has some accounts (or stories, depending on your particular outlook on such things) which can only be described as shockingly incredible. I have a few of these which always make my list of most likely to have caused personal revelation.

There's the prophetic version of "When Animals Attack" in which Elisha is strolling along on his way to somewhere, when for no recorded reason an apparently large crowd of "youths" begins to mock him with the name "bald-head". While not especially witty, the name apparently agitates Elisha, so he calls down a curse on these youths...and two bears come out of the woods and maul forty-two members of the crowd! This may be one reason we don't see wide use of the insult "bald-head" today. A few years earlier when the Israelites were on their way into Canaan, there was a fellow by the name of Balaam living there already. The details of the account are a bit long, but at one point this man is riding his donkey along a road. For various reasons God is not happy with what Balaam is doing, so he sends an angel to block the road. His donkey can see the angel, and so leaves the road to avoid running into it. Balaam beats the donkey to get her back on the road. This happens a couple of more times with the angel, the donkey avoiding it, and the beating. So then the angel allows the donkey to speak, and the donkeys says to Balaam "What have I done to you to make you beat me these three times?" Then, Balaam was either accustomed to talking animals or more of a man than I because he didn't miss a beat and responded, "You have made a fool of me!" They actually go on to have a little conversation about the happenings of that afternoon, and this was way before the invention of any synthetic narcotics.

There is one of these accounts though which I come back to with some frequency. It comes during the time of David. The Israelites were forever fighting with a particular group of people known as the Philistines. They were sort of like high school rivals in a way, only with wars and burning cities instead of football games and pranks. At one point the Philistines have the ark of the covenant, which was essentially an elaborate wooden chest which housed the holy things of Israel, including the tablets on which God had carved the ten commandments. The ark was extremely important to Israel. I'm sure you've seen the Indiana Jones movie. The Israelites went to get it back, and it wasn't hard because the Philistines had already decided to send it away. On the way back to Jerusalem, the oxen pulling the cart carrying the ark stumbled, so a man by the name of Uzzah reached out and steadied it. He was immediately struck dead. It was the law that no one except men of a certain tribe could touch the ark or any of the holy things, but David still got angry with God for killing Uzzah. He no longer wanted to take the ark to Jerusalem, so he left it at someone's house and went home. Three months later David went back to get the ark, and took it to Jerusalem with him.

Sometimes I relate to the way David felt when he left God on someone's farm. I have no way of physically leaving God anywhere, but I think maybe I would do it at times if I could. I probably wouldn't even go all the way out to a farm, I'd just leave him in the church parking lot, or maybe down at the neighborhood park. I'm sure any place I left him would be better for his being there, but at the time I might be too angry or confused to want to talk to him. I'm also quite sure I would go back and get him later and we'd be alright, but that time of separation would be necessary.

Even though I can't physically leave God anywhere, I am sometimes frustrated, confused, and angered by his actions (or lack of actions), just as David was. Mind you this is not an ongoing occurrence (as my pride might have it), but there are those moments when God's decisions become very personal. At these times I believe honesty to be more important than attempting to manufacture an attitude perceived as appropriate and correct, but which is in reality false, and I may emotionally remove myself from God for a season. But I believe this to be appropriate on occasion.

Without honesty I do not believe we can experience spiritual or emotional growth. In fact, I would suggest that believing there is a "correct" way to relate to God, which does not include a little raw emotion has only succeeded in the past to stagnate and embitter people. I tend to think of God as being rather understanding of the whole thing. After all, he did set the system up in the first place, and while it's clearly not exactly what he had in mind, I really expect that he still relates quite well to what's happening. He must know we can't possibly comprehend all of his ways (that's why he's called "God Almighty"), and that there will be times when our humanity gets the best of us, and we'll question him. He would know we're questioning him, and to express something other than this would be lying, which he has gone on record as disliking. No, I think God will understand if we sometimes leave him at Joe's Cafe for awhile...just as long as we come back sooner rather than later.