Topic: spirituality
A few days ago, a lady I really respect was corresponding with me about some of her personal faith issues and previous expectations of God. Like most of us, she had wrestled long and hard with an old faith question that comes up in many arenas, whenever bad things happen to good people. It goes something like this: "Why would a loving God, being a parent, not step in and stop things that are happening to His precious children?"
I have long believed that this question, along with the many hours spent in trying to answer it, is born out of a faulty theology that is woven into the limited understanding that most of the world seems to have whenever we look at God as Father or parent of any gender.
Physical parents, we tend to understand more--we can see them and draw conclusions based on those observations. We have a personal relationship with our parents, whether it's a healthy one or not.
To have a healthy relationship with a Spirit, we must see that "parent" (if that's how we choose to experience God) AS a Spirit. Survivors of horror, when using honest logic instead of rote and rhetoric, have to find ways to resolve the old issues that render the old theological understandings useless. This is especially difficult when all of the theologians we know are wrapped up in preserving the old.
