21. Out of the Mouths of Babes

Yesterday I was babysitting two of my favourite kids and we watched this movie called The Miracle Maker.  It’s basically a claymation (with a bit of animation) telling of the story of Jesus.  It was interesting watching it with these kids whose parents have both, at one time or another, been pastors at my church.  They anticipated pretty much everything (except for Mary Magdalene’s demon possession, which scared one of the kids, but I didn’t know that until her dad came home and she started crying… kids can be weird that way), and were explaining the lessons we can learn from the stories as they came along.  

We get to the part about the temptation of Christ – specifically the part where Satan tempted Christ to throw himself off of a building so that the angels would catch him – and the little girl got a bit confused and started asking what was going on.  I started to explain, but the 8 year old boy jumped in and said “He’s asking Jesus to try and prove God is good, instead of just believing it.  We are not supposed to test God.”

I turned and stared at him – not that he noticed, he was too busy strategizing how he was going to cream me at Risk – it’s not that I haven’t heard that before, it’s just that I hadn’t heard it so clearly before.  I know we are not supposed to test God; I had just not really thought about what that means… or made the connection between this passage and my life.

How many times did I pray and ask God to prove He loved me and that He was good by making me straight?  

Or ask Him to prove His goodness by explaining His rules to me?

So I’ve been thinking about what it means to have the ‘faith of a child’… does it means to accept at face value the statements God has made about His character?  Children believe what you say, no matter the evidence to the contrary.  I think about all the times, as a child, when my dad would tell me he was going to call, or come visit, and I would believe him – no matter how many times he broke his promises, I would believe him (and, if I’m completely honest, I still do that with him… I really should know better by now).  I don’t mean that to say that this is what my relationship with God is supposed to be like, just to point out the absolute faith I had as a child.

Now, I’m going to stray into some possible heresy here… but we grow out of that blind faith for a reason.  In order to be able to fend for ourselves, we need to be able to test things.  We take cars for test drives, we get building inspectors to look at new houses before we buy them… we learn how to test things – and people – so we can see who and what we can and cannot trust.  These are necessary survival skills.  But we are not supposed to apply them to our relationship with God?  That seems impossible to me.  

I know that in comparison to God I will never be more than a child – and I like the idea of being His child that he cares for and looks after.  But it is hard not to question His goodness when I am faced with what, at worst, looks like cruelty, and at best looks like randomness.  Hurricane Katrina… the Tsunami… both very random, and both within the realm of God’s creation and control… and of course, there are countless other examples.

But of course, this is my blog, and this is all about me, so let’s get self-centered for a moment.  I’m gay… and whether or not it’s genetic, or the result of events in my childhood; it’s something I have had no control over.  It’s something random that happened to me.  I can control my behavior, but I cannot control who I am attracted to, who I fall in love with.  And the arbitrariness of the apparent rule against any expression of that part of me bothers me – to put it mildly (again, let me reassert that I am still thinking about this, I’m not sure if such a rule exists).  It seems cruel, and kind of thoughtless – and those are not characteristics that I want in a God I worship.  

And yes, I’ve read the arguments about gender complimentarity, and… well… I guess I’ve just seen too many heterosexual relationships that were not good because there was no real complimentarity, and I’ve seen gay relationships where there was wonderful complimentarity – one of the most balanced relationships I know of is the one I mentioned before, between one of my best friends and her girlfriend.  They just compliment each other so well.  The argument will go on to say that there is no complimentarity between people of the same gender physically… but is the physical aspect the only important and relevant part of a relationship?  Not to mention the fact that I’m not even sure I buy that this argument is based in Scripture… it seems more like psychobabble to me.  

Anyway, the point is that despite all of this, I am called to trust in the goodness of God.  I am not to test Him.  Is that what I’m doing now?  I don’t think so… I don’t think asking questions is testing Him… but I am to trust in His goodness in the midst of all of this.  This is so hard, and I don’t know if I can do it.