The Divine Playwright.

[jackofallgeeks]

So I was talking to Cindy today. And at one point she mentioned having a discussion about depression with one of her other friends, and her friends said, "you know why you get depressed? Because you're not doing God's Will. Because there's something you should be doing and you're not." And Cindy's reply was, "Oh, yeah, that makes sense. Duh."

And I was thinking, "No. No it doesn't."

And this highlights a significant difference between myself and a good number of the people who go to Steubenville and Christendom and the like. Put simply, I don't have 'practical' faith, for lack of a better word. Maybe 'trust in God,' is better. I believe in God and Jesus and the Resurrection, Heaven and Hell and salvation. I believe that God has made us for a purpose and generally has our best in mind.

But from there I get a bit Deistic. At the end of the day, it's what you do with your life that matters. I don't believe God has every day of our lives, yet alone every action, scripted out from here until eternity. I don't even believe that God will guarantee your life will be as it ought to be: people fail. People are miserable. It happens.

What I really don't like about the above, "you get depressed because you aren't doung God's Will," it that t leads itself so easily to being over-scrupulous about things. How can you know God's Will? Can can you be sure you're doing it? If you're depressed, but you've been doing everything 'right,' then what?

I do believe in God, and that we have a purpose, and I'm even pretty sure that he does take a hand in things now and again -- I don't think he's just watching his clockwork reality wind down. But I also don't think we're meant to run like robots according to some divine script we aren't allowed to read. You get depressed because there are sad things you can't get over, or because stress is tearing at you, or because you're biologic chemistry is off. Life is ambiguous. The best you can do is to do the best you know. To be a good person and do what's right, as well as you can with what you have and know.

As for my lack of faith, which I do think is a failing in certain respects, we can discuss that another time.

Comments

[tzohekiti.livejournal.com]

Dear shit that child needs to read "Why Good Things Happen To Good People"...

[metis2be.livejournal.com]

Her belief in that can be a good thing. If she is thinking she's not doing what god intended for her, it might be inspiration to pull herself out of a rut and change what's making her depressed.

Problem is, that only works on some forms of depression. My relationship with Joel made me horribly depressed, and that belief may have made me end my relationship with him earlier. Then again, I get depressed every fall when the weather changes, but moving to florida and saying it's gods will isn't the solution.

I have to say, very few things make me as angry as when people such as politicians say that god spoke to them and told them what to do. As an athiest it angers me that people will try to weild their religion to suit their own desires, but on a practical level I find it unbelievably arrogent that they think an all powerful being would waste its time telling them how to design foreign policy.

I think the best belief structure has to do with the fact that if God's all knowing, it's not possible for humans to understand its wills and desires.

And if you think about it, how boring would a world be if you controlled all aspects of it?

[xenu.livejournal.com]

I also don't think we're meant to run like robots according to some divine script we aren't allowed to read.

For some reason that sentence is really really beautiful to me right now.

What I believe is this: we can not define the undefinable (and to me, this whole cosmic mishmosh is just that) but we can have a damned good time with the pieces we DO manage to decipher, even if we're wrong.

And even though I'm closer to what we might call a skeptical agnostic (or perhaps an open-minded atheist), sometimes everything does seem a bit too beautiful to be happy coincidence. Then again, perhaps that is exactly why the world is so heartbreakingly beautiful.

From the perspective of Cindy

[abbasangel35.livejournal.com]

I have depression and take medicine for it. I actually didn't have any depressing thoughts (which had never happened before) for a few weeks before this. I've been trying to listen to God more closely, because I don't even know who I am, or what I'm supposed to do with my life. Why it made sense that I was depressed because I didn't listen to God is because I was supposed to tell someone something, but didn't because of something they said which made me depressed.
Being depressed, made me even more depressed. Plus, I was depressed about something I didnt want to be depressed about, which made me even more depressed. I didnt want to be depressed anymore. I hate being depressed so I wanted to get out of it. When my friend said that, it made sense to me, and so I told the person the thing I was supposed to tell them, and I'm out of my depressive state.
Thank you.