God Over Good By Luke NorsworthySample

Day Five: Grieving God

Whatever causes us to get to the point of letting go, doing so still won’t be easy. Letting go isn’t easy because it means letting go of who we expected God to be and how we expected our lives to go. In some ways, it’s like a death that requires us to mourn the loss of who we thought God was supposed to be. If we don’t grieve, we can’t move past the loss.

My friend Betty worked with teenagers losing their eyesight, a bitter pill for anyone to swallow but especially a kid. Betty, also blind, told me they referred to the teenagers not properly grieving their loss as having McDonald’s grief, because they were just driving through it. McDonald’s grief is like taking only the first pill of a prescription of antibiotics; taking one pill actually makes the situation worse than if we hadn’t taken any pills. Not dealing with the grief allows the grief to mutate into something even stronger. Unhealthy and incomplete mourning makes room for cynicism to take up permanent residency in the soul. The negativity we thought we dealt with was never flushed out. 

I needed to grieve all that God was never going to be for me. I had to make peace with a few realities: God is not the deus ex machina deity I wanted. God’s sacred text is not as black and white as I assumed. God’s church is not unscathed by the messiness of humanity. God will not give me a sign that will remove all my doubts. God will not give me the simplistic binary of God-equals-good and not-God-equals-not-good that I desired. But upon letting go of what I expected, I was able to accept what God is. The choice will always be between keeping our old expectations or finding new ways of acceptance. We can’t have both. Once I found acceptance, I became aware of a world of goodness on the other side of cynicism.

When we begin to ruthlessly eliminate our expectations, our eyes open to the beauty in everything around us. But as long as our hands are clenched around our expectations, we will not be open to who God is because we will be constantly comparing God to our definition of what a good God should be.

Describe a time you have missed God’s goodness because it came in a different way than you expected.