Is God Off-duty?
Confronting doubts about God's managerial oversight
Editor’s Note: Have a question about whether 2025, off to a horrifying start, is going to be even more of a burning-turd inferno than 2024 was? Don’t Ask Matt®. If he could predict the future, he wouldn’t be here — he’d be playing the Pick 6 at Pimlico. But for all other questions, do Ask Matt™ at askmattlabash@gmail.com. If and when the muse moves, he will answer some of them. But only then. So don’t take it personally if he doesn’t. It’s not you, it’s him (and his lazy-ass muse).
Dear Matt,
Some days, I believe in this God that you periodically speak of. Other days, like when Trump essentially walks on four of four felony cases, any one of which should have seen him doing hard time, or I read about kids getting kidnapped and shipped away from Ukraine to the land of their invader, or the city of Los Angeles is burning in a wind-whipped lake of fire for no good reason, resulting in thousands of lives and homes destroyed, I think of God, “Hey dude, are you out for a cigarette?” How do you keep faith in such a hit-or-miss manager?
Best,
A. Searcher
Thanks a ton, A. I haven’t done an Ask Matt in a while, and was kind of hoping to keep things light this week. Maybe to weigh in on frivolous concerns, like who has better chicken between Raising Cane’s or Chick-fil-A, or whether you should wear white bucks after Labor Day. (Or should you be wearing white bucks at all, if your name isn’t Boss Hogg?)
Instead, you’re kicking me down heaviness hill. For which you’ve earned my enduring resentment. But I’m a sporting type and grudgingly enjoy a challenge, so will play along. I should say at the outset that I gave up, some time ago, trying to explain God. Since he’s never seemed overly pressed about explaining himself to me. Though I consider myself on his team, I figure if God’s God, and could create a universe from scratch, he’s more than capable of handling his own PR. Even as I sure hope that there is a God. Otherwise, I’ve been speaking to an imaginary friend all these years. And if that were the case, I’d probably have chosen to call him something less pretentious than “God” — maybe going with the more approachable “Kevin.”
Though I logged plenty of church time as a youth — by conscription, when not by choice — I spent a lot of it doing precisely what you’re doing, looking around at all the death and pestilence and injustice in this world, as the wicked too often seem to prosper (Exhibit A: Elon is the world’s richest man), then asking, “Why God/Kev, why?”