With relaxation of COVID controls in some areas, a few other things are coming back into the headlines. That includes protests, specifically, I have noticed, in Lebanon. Not getting into the weeds of this (as if I’m qualified anyway), but I have noticed a common theme through these protests: betrayal.
It would be unfair to portray protesters in general as It’s-somebody’s-job-to-look-after-me folks (although there will be some of that). There is a sense of betrayal in much of it. They are angry with governments that have not kept their word; they have broken contract with their people.
Anger. What’s behind it? There are three or four trillion experts on this. I am not one of them. But it is fairly clear to even a non-psychologist like me that betrayal, eventually at least, leads to anger. I say “eventually at least” because I am supposing there could be at first, or mixed all together with it, confusion, numbness, denial–all that stuff. Personal betrayal is horribly painful, especially if you realize that it may not just be that you find you didn’t really know the person who betrayed you, but it may be that you long projected on the other what you wanted them to be, and it turned out they were not that person. So add guilt, however unwarranted, to the mix.
Now consider the preceding paragraph and consider that it is God (or the universe, or however you might be inclined to think) who is the betrayer. It is basic to pretty much all thinking about a universal superior being that he/she/it is simultaneously all-powerful and loving. So why COVID? Why am I exiled in my own home? Why don’t have a home in the best of times? Just in how we are conditioned to think about God we are also set up to experience God as The Great Betrayer. Broke his contract with me, that one: “God, did I ever really know you?”
We are invited to get into the weeds on this. Some follow one who said, flat out, “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). Jesus said this, it should be noted, on the way to showing that he had some credibility about who is to be trusted in this life and existence thing, and how it will all turn out.
I get two main take-aways from this: One, do not, ever, let fear overcome you. Two (not necessarily in this order), love, no matter what.
Go ahead, be angry with God. Talking anger with God is like talking weather with a fellow human: It at least starts the conversation.