What is Good?

"Is your eye evil because God is good?"  Peter Leithart gave an amazing sermon on Matthew 20 that has always stuck in my mind.  It was one of those sermons you wrestle with for years.  The story of the laborers in the field messes with our idea of fairness in a way that makes us wonder if God really is good.  Isn't that the point?

When I do these little test exercises on my kids at home it really stirs up their hearts.  I will give everyone a cookie, but some people get two.  Everyone will start casting sidelong glances, and soon will start asking, "what's up?"  We are all into fairness when it means someone else has to give something up.  Wouldn't it be more just if the people who have two break theirs in half and share?  I don't know let's ask them what they think.  But the most important question is, "Do any of you deserve a cookie?"  Maybe we should be grateful that we got one and rejoice for those who got two.  What?  That just doesn't sit well with us at all.  Try it with a group of kids sometime, it makes for a great discussion.  Try it with adults and you will probably get socked in the nose, or a pouty silence and some murmuring later.

Which is where I have been in my wrestling with this passage.  The bottom line is (I'm a bottom line kind of girl), do I believe God is good?  If I can settle my heart on the solid rock that God IS good, and whatever comes my way is from Him then I can do all the crazy stuff like count it all joy when various trials come my way.  I can say that God is good in a way that goes against a lot of our ideas about goodness.  We think a good God would let us sleep in everyday and that chocolate would be at the bottom level of the food guide pyramid instead of whole grains.  We try to define God's terms by our standards which is where we get very muddled ideas of ourselves and God.  It is also I am discovering where we get very muddled ideas about ourselves and our parents.  Parents who give two cookies to some siblings and one to others are obviously evil even though they feed and clothe and provide and sacrifice for you everyday.  I need to make sure that my idea of goodness comes from the right source and that I bank everything else in my life on that idea and not the myriad of other strange ideas that float around me.  I don't get to define things like goodness, justice, fairness, righteousness, God does because these ideas are way too big for my little brain to contain much less apply to others.

He gave me a whole book of instructions (I'm also not the kind of girl who reads owners manuals, so this is a challenge for me), that explains who He is and why He does things in the crazy manner He does.  Sometimes the book doesn't give any clear instruction, just a lot of rather wild stories that leaving you thinking, hmmm...  I can say that over years of reading and rereading and living out my own crazy story that it starts to take definite shape.  Now by definite shape I mean I know when to say, "I just need to pray about that," instead of "well, the Bible says..."  I realize that when I was 20 I had an answer for everything, but now that I'm 44 things seem a whole lot less simple.  The extenuating circumstances are more varied, and God's Word has become deeper and wider.

The longer I live here under the sun, the more I realize that what I see is extremely limited, and unclear.  God has the vantage point of knowing the end from the beginning.  He knows ALL the extenuating circumstances.  He has his reasons for sending a trial or a blessing at a certain time and I don't really need to know those reasons most of the time.  What I do need to know is that He is God.  I am not.  He is good.  I am only good because of Him.  I don't need to know why things happen, I just need to know that my Father who loves me allowed them to happen and that it will be for my good even when it doesn't feel good or look good.  I have also found that I can see God doing good things in the lives of my friends when they are struggling with a difficult circumstance.  They feel burdened and worn down, but I can see the glory in their lives as they carry on trusting in God.  I can hope that others see that in me when I am trudging along feeling nothing but extra weight and uneven ground.  That is the blessing of living in community with other believers.  We are all in this together and we have different vantage points so we can cheer each other on.

One of my parenting struggles lately has been times when it is obvious that my kids are thinking I must not be good.  I'm not, as we already established, but I am their parent and as imperfect as I may be I still have to make rules for their safety and stick by them.  One odd example is my youngest who informed her grandmother, who gives them each $10 for every road trip home, that their dad takes their money and doesn't let them spend it.  I admit, I got a little bit hot about this, and all the kids know exactly what I think about this line of reasoning.  It is true, that dad does take all the money.  What dad usually does with it, is take them out to dinner or to a movie, or uses it when we go someplace like Silverwood.  I'm not sure what my youngest child thought we did with all this loot, but she was sure that she was being robbed.  The quandary for parents is how to show our kids that we love them and that we are looking out for their good and not just our own.  Our kids have their very mature ideas about what a good parent looks like, and we obviously are lacking.  This curfew business is obvious oppression.  Dad not getting all excited about the latest guy that is texting us 2000 times a month is clearly judgmental.  Mom asking us to change our clothes before church is because she is old fashioned.  Does any of this sound like the kinds of charges we level against God?  So then the obvious question is, "Do I love my kids?"  I am imperfect but I know to give my kids cookies and not rocks if I want to bless them.  I have gotten up in the middle of the night for millions of reasons ranging from crying, to puking, to giving them rides from various events, and I haven't kicked them out of the house yet.  What does love look like?  Does it mean my kids have everything they want and they never get a rebuke or spanking?  Would that be lovely?  Who gets to define love?  Well in this establishment God does.  And here it is: Love is patient; love is kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude; it does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.  Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.  Love never ends.  That just stills my heart.  Yes, kids that is what I am striving for, and you know better than anyone that I fall on my face.  That is the love God has for us, and that is what I am trying to pour out on all of you.

I'm not sure how to wrap this one up, so I will just lay it before God and pray some more.