I went to church for the first time in a while.
The pastor was talking about people who don't deserve their blessings.
You know the setup. The coworker who gets the promotion. The bad people getting good things. He was naming the feeling: I have been showing up. I have been doing the thing. Why am I not getting the reward?
He was building it out so the congregation could identify with the faithful one. The one who shows up. The one who's been doing what they're supposed to do.
I sat there and realized I was the other one.
I haven't been going to church. I haven't been showing up. And I have been blessed.
I am the coworker.
I felt it physically. A small flinch.
The kind you have when someone is describing a person you know and the person starts to look like you. Except in this case the person being described is the one nobody in the room is supposed to want to be.
I tried to argue with it for a second. I am still spiritual. I still pray sometimes. I have been doing my own kind of work. The argument was thin. The argument was the kind you make to a person you are trying to convince.
The argument was for me.
He read Proverbs 3:5-6. He read Hebrews 10:23.
If we cannot trace God's hand, trust his heart.
He said: trust doesn't grow by figuring God out. It grows when you hold on without having all the answers.
I wrote that down because it sounded like something I needed.
I am tired of trying to figure it out. That part is true. I have been trying to figure it out for years. I have been trying to figure out which parts of what I was raised on were God and which parts were people. I have been trying to figure out what I actually believe versus what I was told to believe versus what I would believe if I had been left alone with God in the first place.
I do not know if I am holding on. I do not know if I have anything to hold on to. I want to want to.
That might be the closest thing to honest I have been about it.
Then he turned to the question he had raised. Why do bad things happen to good people. Why do good things happen to bad people. He said he had two answers.
The first was Romans 2:4. God's kindness is what leads you to repentance. The kindness is consistent. He doesn't withdraw it from people who haven't earned it. The wicked aren't getting away with anything; they are being courted.
The second was Matthew 5:44-45. God is not a hypocrite. He sends rain on the just and the unjust alike. The same goodness lands on the same ground.
The wicked are being courted.
I sat with that.
I have been thinking of myself as someone who has stepped away. Someone who has paused. Someone who is figuring it out at her own pace and on her own terms. The framework I had been using made the absence morally neutral. I am not in rebellion. I am in process.
But courted reframes it.
If God's kindness is the courtship, and I have been receiving the kindness, then something has been happening to me that I was not naming. Something has been pursuing me. Something has been continuing to send rain.
I do not know what to do with that.
I wrote feels like a contradiction in the margin.
I wrote contradictions!
Either God is patient with the wicked, or the wicked will be destroyed. The pastor would later quote Psalm 37:8-9 and I would write that one down too. The wicked will be cut off. The meek will inherit. The patience and the destruction are supposed to coexist somehow and I cannot hold both at once.
I keep trying to.
I want the patience to be real and I want the destruction to be metaphorical. I want the kindness to be unconditional and I want there to still be a logic. I want God to love me without my showing up and I want my showing up to mean something.
I cannot have both.
I keep trying to.