goodandevil

The Possible Evil in The Certain Good | Faith as a Crutch

Tonight I spoke with an old friend about varying approaches to life, and an interesting concept came up. The saying goes, “God helps those who help themselves,” and people generally find that to be the case - it’s effective if for no other reason than it ensures that work is getting done.

Some of us, though, are emotional subsistence farmers. We’d like to be the first line of defense, and then if we can’t deal with it, it gets to God. We see that large of a separation. What if God can’t help either? Or more realistically, what if it seems that way?

Recently when circumstances have felt dire, I’ve reached for my cross. This is something I’ve never done in the past, but desperate times call for what appear to be desperate behaviors. I am looking to fill a hole, but in the end that’s all that happens. I dip below the baseline into the negative numbers, I grab the cross, and if things don’t immediately improve at least mentally the protection or consolation I feel bring me to zero. That’s where I am, I’m home, free and clear from the negativity.

That’s all it does though. To get back into the positive, you need something more direct, and perhaps a little stronger: yourself.

What about the saying, you’re asking? How is it any different from you helping yourself the first time? You’re helping yourself in a different way. Before you were acting as a salve just as you later hoped God would.

Now you are not only the solution, but armed with hindsight and context, a means for all the energy at hand to be motivated into creating both an end to the problem - aka a solution - but an anti-problem that goes beyond zero into the positive numbers and creates a genuinely good situation as a buffer.

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