Questions, questions

Okay, I want to tread lightly here, but I have a question to pose, in light of the election results last week.

At what point does God choose to stop "fixing" our mistakes and let us live out the results of our decisions? As parents, we practice tough love sometimes with our children. In order to help them mature, sometimes we choose to not cushion the uncomfortability of some of the situations they get themselves into. They have to learn prudence and they never will if we continually protect them from the consequences of their actions.

Does God do the same for us? While I absolutely and completely believe that God awesomely loves us and only wants the good for us, did He not destroy Sodom and Gomorrah? Did he not bring judgement against individuals in biblical history that chose to ignore him or outright disobey Him? Moses wasn't allowed to enter the Promise Land because of one fit of temper and a thoughtless act of flinging the tablets in anger. And I understand that was the "Old Testament God", before the coming of Christ. But God is still God.

I've also watched, over the years, as painful things have happened to my family and others I love. God CAN but doesn't always choose to heal. How many people do we know that died of cancer? How many women have lost babies. How many people have lost children after birth? Is this because God is callous or unfeeling?

NO! God is the epitomy of caring and love. He IS love. But I've come to believe that God seldom intervenes in the affairs of man. He created nature and He set it up to work a certain way. Why do so many unwed 16-yr. old girls get pregnant after one night of indiscretion, many of them good girls who love the Lord and have been raised with Christian values but just slipped in the heat of passion? Because God created our bodies to function a certain way and he seldom intervenes and stops them from working that way. That said, the reason we have Dane in our family is because God made something unnatural happen with my body. I double ovulated the month Dane was conceived, 12 days apart. I was certain I was safe - absolutely certain, until I ovulated the second time. I know God intervened. Bodies are not supposed to work that way. But why do people get emphysema? The natural consequence of pollution and/or smoking. Why does my father have hardening of the arteries that caused him to go blind? Because he grew up eating wild meat in the backwoods of Canada, much of it salted for preservation.

It's not that I don't believe God CAN make the situation with our government all okay, it's just that I wonder if He even wants to. His people were held in captivity over and over again. They've struggled and fought for their tiny strip of land. Are we in the U.S. any better than God's chosen people, the Israelites?

I'm not trying to light fires here, just posing a question I've been pondering in my heart. Last night, at a meeting I attended that is also attended by a Christian (Spirit-filled) Jewish Rabbi and his wife, we talked about the state of the country. He said that at his last Rabbi's gathering, they were all in agreement that Scripture exhorts us to pray for the King, and our King will soon be Obama. Many of the Rabbi's in his group (the Messianic Rabbinical Association) are from Florida where there is a large Neo-Nazi movement. Some of the Temples have FBI agents that attend their services and are armed just in case of trouble. The FBI has told these Rabbis that the Neo-Nazi's have a clear intent and plan to assassinate Obama. As much as I would like to see someone else in our White House, the thought of the heinousness of that act and what would follow in our country if it was to happen sent chills down my spine and threw me immediately into fervent prayer for the Lord's protection around our President-elect.

There's no question in my mind that we need to pray for our country and ALL it's leaders. But we needed to before the election just as badly as we need to now. People have shared scriptures with me since the election such as Psalm 23 to bring comfort. My mother has said, "God is still on the throne!" Of course He is. And, yes, He wants to lead us beside still waters. But I don't think He's going to stick a bit in our mouths and drag us to still waters anymore than I believe that His being on the throne will change Obama's agenda. We need to pray for our country and President-elect Obama, the Congress and Supreme Court that will be deciding the laws of our land, but we also need to prepare for a United States that may look very different in 4 years.

And, on top of all that, I'll pose another question - how much power does a President really have? Can they EVER accomplish an agenda? Does it even matter (except, of course, in the case of foreign policy and how we're seen abroad) who lives and works in Washington, DC? In my disappointment last Wednesday, I felt the Lord prompted a thought in me: We survived not 4 but 8 years of Bill Clinton. Can we not also weather the upcoming 4 years?

Just the ponderings of my heart on this Wednesday morning in the middle of November.