Does God intervene when bad stuff happens?

I’ve been reading my journal from 1993/94.  It makes harrowing reading;  entry after entry of how strained and difficult everything was.  It was only a year after my divorce, I was working full time in a very busy job and I had my three children to care and provide for, without any help from their father.  I had just taken out a loan to pay him his portion of our house. Writing it all down was a bit of a coping mechanism.  There are some positives, but in the main it’s testament to stoic endurance.  It made me see that God doesn’t intervene very much in practical ways during difficult times.  Or at least, He didn’t for me.

Perhaps when I get to heaven, I’ll see it differently.  And I suppose I can only see it through my own viewpoint and it’s a very emotionally-charged viewpoint.  I was the one rowing the little boat.  I had no time or resources to look dispassionately at what else I could have done.

I was meeting each new thunderclap;  each new swamping wave with the only resources I had – my own moral compass;  strength;  my commitment to my children;  my decision to do the right thing, even when it was very difficult.

God didn’t seem to intervene.  I realise now, after so many decisions which impacted my life so significantly, that He doesn’t.  He’s not like some good fairy who waves her wand and fixes things or changes things or fills up the gaps our decisions have created.

It’s the expectation of mild, compliant, trusting souls.  We commit our way to a Shepherd God, expecting him to lead us and look after us. 

And he does, but not in the temporal sense;  He looks out for our souls.  He will always ensure we are looked for and found in the wild wood, should we wander from our spiritual fold. We belong to Him, and all the verses about shepherds and lost sheep and care, relates only to our spiritual safety.  I didn’t realize that. We, in the west, are so entrenched in our materialistic world, that we relate everything to tangible things, even the biblical stories of Jesus;  we think he’s talking about physical/material things, when all along, he’s using everyday stories to teach us about spiritual truths. This was my mistake.  I expected the wrong thing from God.

I believed in a Good Fairy God, and discovered instead, through trial and testing and aloneness, a suffering Jesus, willing to sacrifice himself to do His father’s will.  When he calls us to follow Him, why are we surprised when He leads us, or allows us to be led, through a cauldron of scarcity or dishonour or injustice?

I discovered the living presence of God, not so much at the time, but afterwards, I knew it was His strength which kept me from going under. I discovered a multi-faceted God; a divine nature with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, steadfastness;  a nature brim full of happy, enriching, bright attributes which gave my soul the ability to soar, despite my circumstances. I discovered a Jesus who put my feet on a path to follow Him, and then tested my sincerity.  He knows that testing produces hope – hope in the divine nature and mercy of God – not hope that He’ll make everything better. Testing produces hope and hope stands us in good stead.  Hope is the wings we use to fly through, rather than trudge over the mud of our circumstances. But it didn’t happen easily, or immediately.  It took me years of turmoil and criticising God, before I knew I was expecting the wrong things from the Divine Hand.

The change in my financial/emotional/physical circumstances was all down to this feckless man I married.  I allowed him to bully me;  I allowed him to take more than his share.  Then, I expected God to help me financially, and that didn’t happen, so I doubted God. 

The fact that I had no strength to make my husband do the right thing by his children, is just how it is.  It was just another inevitable result of marrying him in the first place, and that wasn’t God’s fault. If I had been able to make him do the right thing, I probably would have called it God’s provision, when in fact, it was just me standing up for myself.  This still puzzles me – the decision to behave as Christ did, knowing it will cause us to be disadvantaged.  Perhaps this is the great mystery of why the gate is so narrow, and so few find it.

My husband knew that I couldn’t stand up for myself, especially after all the years of emotional abuse.  And God couldn’t change that – he can’t make people do what’s right, if they are determined not to. So, he has to let people oppress others and He doesn’t always intervene.  If he did, it would be to deny us our very humanity and our free will;  the right to govern ourselves.  We would be like puppet people. 

I can see now, how the impoverished, straightened circumstances of my life have been all my own doing.  They are the result of allowing people to take from me, instead of give;  of my giving to them instead of taking.  I played by the “do to others as you would have them do to you” rule but others were playing by the “I’ll take what’s best for me" rule.  Am I sorry I let this happen?  Yes. But I don’t think I could do otherwise at the time.  It’s easy to look back with perfect 20/20 vision in hindsight.

It’s not wrong to stand up for what should have been mine and my children’s. I wish I’d had the strength to do it.  I didn’t, and I live with the regret of that.  It was a mistake too, to expect restitution and justice from God.  It just added another level of turmoil and disappointment to all the other disappointments.  I became disappointed with God.

I have been able to come to terms with that too. I discovered, surprisingly, that even though I was bullied by people, I came out of it with a much better self-esteem than I’ve ever had in my life.  That was down to God. So, it’s not so much that God didn’t provide for me, during my years of strife – it’s just that He didn’t provide in ways I expected.