My Phone, My Fear, and My God

Illustration by Paul Mathers

My phone started lighting up as I finished a meeting. Calls and texts came in from my son Dylan and a key leader in our church. The leader’s daughter Shayna, Dylan’s girlfriend, had been in a car accident and was unresponsive. As the news sank in, my mind started racing, my breathing changed, and my heart rate went up. I was suddenly afraid.

I had many fears at once, though I was only conscious of a few. What if Shayna doesn’t wake up? What if Dylan needs me and I can’t get to him fast enough? At one moment, when the fears multiplied too fast, I even said, “God, where are you? Don’t you care what we’re going through?”

In weekly posts, I am writing about classical theism, the tradition founded on God’s absolute independence of being. People often accuse classical theists of teaching a cold, remote God who offers no comfort when we are in crisis. Let’s consider that accusation. What did I want from God when I learned about Shayna’s accident?

When I asked where God was, I was complaining that he seemed distant—as if I was calling him over to experience Shayna’s accident from my point of view. I wanted to feel his presence. When I asked whether God cared, I was accusing him of being disengaged from me. I wanted to feel his direct involvement in my experience, to feel his suffering with my own.

When I’m in this state of mind, I can only believe that God cares if he lives inside my head—if he knows what I know in the way that I know it. If I perceive him as too remote, then all his supposed care must be fake.

I see two problems with my attitude.

First, I’m demanding something of God that never even works with human beings. People are insulted when they’re asked to prove that they care. They also disapprove of being told to do things they cannot do. Other people cannot live inside my head or suffer as I suffer. They are unable to care for me by knowing what I know in the way that I know it.

There’s a more reasonable expectation for care. People can show care by listening. They care when they want to hear what’s happening inside my head. When I talk with them about my feelings—although they cannot know them in the way that I do—our relationship can grow.

If other human beings would be insulted by my demand that they suffer as I suffer, why would God react differently?

There’s a second problem with my attitude. I wanted God to know what I know in the way that I know it. But the reason I became afraid after hearing about Shayna’s accident is that I didn’t know key things about the past, present, and future. I didn’t know what happened in the accident an hour-and-a-half before, or where the accident took place. I didn’t know what it meant that Shayna was “unresponsive.” I didn’t know Dylan’s state of mind. And I didn’t know what Shayna’s condition would be by the end of the day.

In fact, I knew even less than that.

Countless fears emerged so quickly that I was unable to detect which one elevated my heart rate and changed my breathing. I could not recognize which fear was most important to me. In all candor, I don’t have clear memories of the first hour after I got the news.

I am made of parts. I am a composite being. There are events in my body that I don’t know, and events in my spirit that I don’t know either. Furthermore, my body has parts within it, as does my spirit. I am broken up. My attention can only focus on one thing at a time. All sorts of events happen within me that I never notice. Trying to peer into my own experiences is like trying to see a complete image in a shattered mirror.

When I demanded that God know what I know in the way that I know it, I was telling God to be almost completely ignorant. In reality, God can care for me most powerfully if he knows more than I know. He can express his compassion best if he knows me completely—all events in all my parts, from my past through my present to my future.

My demand that God live inside my head was really a move to refashion him in my image. I wanted him to act on my knowledge, to be a more powerful version of me, and to reassure me that my experience was the best definition of reality.

This is how idols “care” for idolaters. They affirm the thoughts of those who make them.

When I’m afraid, the care I truly need comes from the living God, who is not like me at all. He is not the prisoner of time that I am, unable to see what the next ten minutes will bring. Nor is he caught in a certain location, unable to reach somewhere else without traveling. God is not composed of parts. There is no segment of his being that he must consider separately to focus his attention. He doesn’t have to go to a dentist, a counselor, or a radiologist.

When I receive care from the living God, I am drawing upon his essential life as the source of my own life. I am drinking from a well that never dries up. I am living upon what theologians call God’s aseity—his absolute independence as God. He is the Other. His alien nature is exactly what I need.

I need God because he needs nothing.

After I asked where God was and whether he cared that Shayna had been in an accident, I decided to change my point of view. I felt the same fears, but I understood better where they originated. My fears came from me, not my situation.

This shift of perspective transformed my panic into certainty. I was not sliding down a sand dune. I was perched on a rock. I felt fear inside, but also looked at my fear from the outside. I could catalog what I didn’t know about Shayna’s accident, feeling the danger grow by the minute, but I could also feel my trust in God grow at the same time. The Other, who knew all that I did not, had already intervened in Shayna’s accident, was already present with Dylan, and would hold us all as we suffered.

If I am receiving “care” from a fantasy image of myself, an idol, then my soul is merely on painkillers. But if God is God, then his absolute independence is a reality that confines my suffering within his love.

For this reason we have David’s prayer (Psalm 61.1-3): “Hear my cry, O God, listen to my prayer; from the end of the earth I call to you when my heart is faint. Lead me to the rock that is higher than I, for you have been my refuge, a strong tower against the enemy.”