If ever there was a question guaranteed to provoke division this is it. You don’t even know what I am referring to yet and I’ll bet that depending on the answer, there are a good dozen things about which you feel so strongly, one way or another, that you’re tensing up just thinking about it. If that is the case with lesser topics, imagine what people’s reactions are when you ask that question about God.

If your experience has been anything like mine, you know this can be a very touchy subject. Why does this question provoke such a sharp reaction, both from those who would answer yes, as well as those who say no? If you read Life, Love & Internet Dating or these blog posts, you know I am not shy about talking about God, and you may also know a few other things. I relate to him as a he—but in truth, I doubt he actually has a gender as we know it. I have a close and personal relationship with him—he is not an anthropomorphic fantasy of a guy with a white beard in a white robe—I cannot visualize him, hear him, or imagine what form he would take, burning bush, rolling mist, sunrise, sunset, who the heck knows? You also know that I don’t relate to him out of a religious context, he is not a Christian god, Jewish or a Muslim god or in any way connected to any religion, he is just God.

That’s part of our problem, we keep trying to put him in a box—because we are so limited by our human vision that we cannot imagine something so much beyond our understanding that we have to try to pin it down like a butterfly in a shadow box. Of course when you do that the butterfly dies. When we try to pin down God—it has much the same effect.

I have heard just about every argument for why not to believe—and I want to say here that I truly respect those who don’t. God does not need you to believe in him, it is ok. The important thing is that he believes in you—loves you in fact. And even if you do not believe in him, he is still at work in your life, like it or not. You can invite him in—he wants that, but he can go anywhere, do anything with or without your help, or your permission, because he is God.

Lot’s of folks weigh in on this God or no God debate. There are some who regard God as an intelligent watchmaker—a kind of higher authority who engineered the world and then wound it up and let it go. Others flat out say he’s just an emotional crutch or a substitute for our own super ego, and so on. Well I am not here to tell you to believe or not, that’s up to you. But I do want to respond to one particular line of negative reasoning—the one that says God could not possibly have a close and personal relationship with just one person—that it would be inconceivable that he could know everything about everyone and respond to everyone all of the time. I am summarizing here but those who counter this argument say—well he has angels, or he is everywhere or some other thing to explain how this is possible.

I am sorry but these well-intentioned explanations also miss the point. They miss it because they again reduce God to human terms and suggest limitations on a being we cannot comprehend. And that, is the crux of the matter—we cannot comprehend God so we reject his existence. I am not going to go down the rabbit hole of why God allows bad things to happen—he doesn’t allow anything—that’s humans doing things, life itself. His role is simple—leave us to make our own choices unless we ask him to take over, and make something good come from even our most horrific behavior. And he does—not always in the way we think he should—but he does it working with whatever we give him.

As you may know, I am a widower. I lost my wife to Leukemia 8 years ago. It was incredibly hard. I will save the story for another time, but say here that after a long period of grieving I found my life again. I miss my wife greatly—know that I will be with her again (she told me that—but that is another story) but the point is my life continued and unfolded sometimes in painful ways and sometimes in beautiful ways. The pain was largely self-inflicted—the beauty something I would never have predicted—because it came from him like all the good things in my life.

I was talking to a widow this morning on my way into work. I stopped by the store she ran—her husband, a fellow I thought was pretty cool, had died suddenly of an aneurysm about a year ago, leaving her to take over his hardware business. She said she was not a believer—she seemed almost angry saying it—but admitted she had been raised in a religious family. I did not try to persuade her in any way. But after a few minutes she told me that she did believe in an after-life and knew she would be with her husband again. I was thinking to myself about that contradiction—but said nothing. So there you have it—we are funny creatures—we can hold two completely antithetical thoughts in our minds without the slightest discomfort. I wanted to know who it was she thought had made this after-life, if not God, but I stopped short. It isn’t important, and she would not have known what to say in any event. God is used to these contradictions, he’s heard them all