Why God Really Isn't Picking On You - Or Anyone

Do you see the tiny human being standing on that tiny speck of dust in the spiral arm of the galaxy on the right? His car broke down yesterday. He'll spend fifteen hundred dollars he doesn't have to get it fixed, and next week, he'll drop a dozen eggs on his favorite shoes and nick himself with the razor his favorite auntie gave him for Christmas. After that, as so many times before in his forty-five years of life, he'll wonder - why is God picking on me? Did I do something to piss him off? Did I trip children and shove the elderly in a past life? There must be some reason for all the bad luck - right?

Maybe. Or maybe not. Here are three good reasons to abandon the belief that God personally picks on you, and how to change your thinking in order to free yourself from the illusion of being a mere prop in the universal shooting range.

Look at the picture above once more. Pretty, isn't it? That's the Milky Way galaxy, our cosmic home in the universe. From one side to another, the Milky Way measures 100,000 light years - that's 100,000 years traveling at 186,000 miles per second, or 600,000 trillion miles. It also contains hundreds of billions of stars, many of which host solar systems much like our own, complete with planets, moons, asteroids, and comets.

In the kind of universe where the numbers above are literally a drop in the bucket, and where our galaxy is only one grain of sand on a beach of infinite size, does it really make sense to assume that God has time to mess with your blender, make you step on gum five minutes before an important business meeting, or give the cat diarrhea? Naw - so cheer up! God has better things to do.

Ever dropped your last piece of toast butter side down and wondered why it had to happen at one in the morning, with not so much as an old can of sea kittens left to eat in the house? Did you glare at the heavens before you retrieved your dead toast to give it a proper trashcan burial?

I know I have. It's silly, but it's also 100% human. Of course we know God isn't to blame for our lost late-night snack, just as we know he didn't really wait behind the refrigerator to trip us on the way to the couch, but we have to blame someone, so it might as well be the creator - after all, he made gravity, and gravity killed the toast! Maybe it's a divine conspiracy to destroy the morale of toast lovers...then again, maybe we're just clumsy.

Accidents happen. We stub our toes on the world because neither we nor anything else is perfect. But of this be sure - despite everything that may cause it to appear otherwise, God really does love us.

When I was a kid, my mom and I used to go grocery shopping together, always on foot because we didn't have a car. On the way to the store, there was a pretty little fountain in a public plaza alive with flowers, people, and birds. I could never resist playing near the fountain, but my mom used to warn me that one day I'd fall in. Of course I didn't listen; to my mind, she was just over-protective and saw danger where there was none.

As it turns out, mom had one thing I didn't - experience. The day I toppled into the fountain, all flailing legs and gangly arms pinwheeling in panic, I learned that the edge of a fountain wasn't a great place to practice speed-walking.

Life is full of such lessons. Some are small, like my bath in the slimy waters of the local bum urinal (it's amazing what you find out when your mother is mad at you). Some are much larger, like the lessons about death, sickness and heartbreak I learned later in life. The point is, God didn't push me into the fountain, and God didn't cause my heartbreak. Life happens. People happen. Between human error and the forces that govern the natural world, there's no reason to blame God for the mayhem.