When it comes to God, I don't know what I believe - or that is to say, I don't wholly believe in the God of any particular religion, but I don't wholly disbelieve, either. Some days I would call myself a believer. But pretty much every day, I can understand the desire to believe, especially if what you are drawn to believing in (as I am) is a God who is like a loving parent to us, who looks upon us and wants the best for us, but who might not always be able to protect us from ourselves.
This makes more sense to me since Katie was born. Before, I always felt a sort of bullshit detector go off when I thought about the whole "bad things happen to good people"/"God has a Larger Plan and that means some of us have to get hurt" line of thinking. I thought, well, THAT sucks. What kind of God is that? It can't be a God who is all good, all knowing, and all powerful, can it?
But then I sit in my living room, and I watch Katie cruising around the room. Trying to stick everything into her mouth, including dirt and hair and things she could choke on, because that is how she explores the world. Trying to pull herself up to standing on the rocking chair, not knowing that not only is the rocker going to move, but that her weight is going to pull the rockers down toward her little feet. Trying to stand on her own two feet and then falling over sideways or forwards or backwards with such force that her head might thud on the floor.
And one of us - Geoff or me - is sitting RIGHT THERE, you know? We are right there, in the same room, a few feet or even a few inches away, watching out for Katie, trying to make sure she doesn't get anything nasty or dangerous in her mouth, and trying to keep her away from the rocking chair (or at least from pulling it onto herself), and trying to catch her when she falls. And yet we know that in the end, she needs to learn to walk! And so sometimes she falls. And sometimes she gets hurt.
We want her to walk, and in learning how to walk - there is just no way around it - she is going to fall, more than once.
So it's not like we don't care, and it's not like we are just letting her go out on her own to fend for herself, and it's not like we aren't doing our best to protect her from harm. At the same time, since we want her to grow and learn and thrive and figure things out for herself, we sometimes have to let her stand there against the CD shelves, for instance, pulling out CD's, even if it means that she possibly might pull a CD out with such force that she loses her balance and falls backward.
If she falls, I will always try to catch her. But sometimes, since I am trying to let her grow and learn, she is going to get hurt.
And tears come to my eyes when I realize that this is going to happen over the entire course of her life. There will always be this balance of trying to figure out how much to let her do on her own and how much to decide on her behalf. (Well, until the time comes when we can't tell her what to do - well, I mean, we can tell her, but she sure won't have to do it.) How big should we allow her choices to be? How much do we allow her to risk? How will we help her heal when the choice she has made hurts her? How much will it hurt my heart if her arm gets broken? How much will it hurt when her heart gets broken?
Anyway, this is not a directly applicable analogy to God, but it makes me understand how it is possible to unconditionally love and want the best for someone and to still allow them to get hurt. It is possible to love someone so much that if you think very much or very hard about that person getting hurt, it makes you crazy or it makes you cry, and yet still, you make the decision to let them grow and learn on their own. You make the decision to let them get hurt. You hope and pray that they don't get hurt - we sit on the other side of the room while Katie stands for a few seconds at a time, holding both hands in the air, wobbling, and we cross our fingers and hope and pray that she does not fall. Sometimes she doesn't. Sometimes Katie stands for a few seconds and then, instead of falling, she grabs back onto a nearby object and smiles. But sometimes she wobbles and falls and we wince and she cries. And what can we do? When she falls and hurts herself, we can rush to her and pick her up and hold her and comfort her until she stops crying.
And later, when she wants to try again, we can let her.
This entry started out as an email I sent to Eliza in response to this lovely entry. In the weeks that have passed since then, I keep thinking about what I said, so I decided to write about it here.
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