Skip to main content

God's Match

"Find God's match for you!"

That is a line from God's TV commercial.  God has a match for you.  God isn't going to tell you where to find the match--that is his inscrutable secret--but if you send a few bucks to the match company, they will be able to tell you what God wants you to know but is not going to tell you.

I do not want to be misunderstood:  I am in favor of playing with matches, although not to the point of burning things down.  And I understand sometimes it is very difficult to find a match.  But, then, I have never been under the delusion that there is just one, God-anointed, absolutely perfect match for me, and that God isn't going to tell me where it is.  And I have never tried sending a few bucks to God's Match Company to find out who the perfect match might be:  I just bumbled around, and I must say that it worked out really nicely, after a while, too.

Maybe it is because I remember an old comedic line about having looked for "the perfect woman", and having found her, but that she was looking for the perfect man.

I will admit that I am a bit perplexed at God's Plan.  God matched up Adam and Eve, and that didn't work out so well.  God eventually threw them out of the Garden, and slammed the gate shut, telling them not to come back.  But that aside, if the Almighty and All-knowing One actually has thought ahead and made plans about who ought to be matched up with whom, why doesn't God just issue serial numbers, or something like that; you know, Google the number around your neck and see who else has the same number?  The internet is more-or-less free.  There is no need to have to send money to a match company, is there?

I don't know:  maybe it is the divorce lawyers who have made everything so obscure and difficult!  They must have a financial stake in bad matches.  Leave it to a lawyer to complicate God's simple plan for perfect matches.  Pre-nups here, torts there, property settlements and court orders and alimony and a fog of legalese, and pretty soon you find yourself sending money to God's Match Company.  Why not just get it right, and do what God isn't willing to tell you about for free?

And the Lord Only knows why the divorce rate is highest in the Bible Belt of America!  The ways of the Almighty are mysterious, indeed, when the people who talk to God most, and most sincerely, seem to be precisely the people who have the worst matches!  If a Southern Baptist can't get a good fahr going with the Missus, what chance do the rest of us have, who never thought to ask God for directions in the first place?

I do believe that I should stop listening to commercials on TV.  It is destroying what little faith I do have left in divine guidance.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Watching a Formerly Sane Man Descend into Abject Religion

If you read the previous post, you know the apparatus, pictured here, is a torture machine. There are ten of them in our house, purportedly to circulate air to dry out all the problems caused by a water leak. We live in Tucson:  it has not rained in Tucson since the Gadsden Purchase. A mudslide the size of the one in Washington State could course through our neighborhood and it would be bone-dry and stone-hard before it quit moving. I suspect it is the CIA, and probably the Border Patrol! We are, after all, only about a hundred miles from the border. I fully expect a large suburban assault vehicle to pull up to the house, and for lots of people with UPPER CASE LETTERS on their shirts to interrogate us, and I will have to explain that all the drugs I use come from Walgreens and Total Wine. But it won't work.  Our minds are going. We are getting short with each other and, if they promise to turn off the fans, I will confess to having invented the Arab...
Post a Comment
Read more