In today’s episode of #OffTheHighway, Dr. Deborah Loyd takes a moment to share her thoughts on God’s hiddenness.  She quotes Oswald Chambers and frames the question as “God in the clouds.”

Deborah makes the statement that it is when we are “stressed” and “in pain” that God shows up.

This is one of the big questions about God’s presence and the biblical narrative.  In stark contrast to the “God wants you to be happy, rich and comfortable” messages that seems to fill our airwaves and many of our pulpits, there seems to be this very real theme that God is in poverty, poverty of spirit, marginalization, sickness, hunger, mourning, etc.  Not only that, but even when things are not necessarily that painful, God seems to bring the pain when appearing: “Woe is me…”

So this begs a question, “Do we human meat-robots require externally imposed desperation as a prerequisite to encountering God?”

Sometimes it seems as such.  I don’t know that Deborah would go so far as to say “requires” but her answer here seems to imply a correlation.

My thought, theologically, is that we two-legged works of art were created to meet with God.  It is our very nature.  Desperation seems to be a catalyzing agent to wake us into our humanity.  Desperation is required.

Now, does desperation require a cocktail of: Pain, hunger, marginalization, illness, sorrow, etc.?  I hope not.  But it is also hard to imagine, at least in our ‘under the sun’ experiment, that desperation and comfort can coexist.

What say you?