Favor vs. Retribution

Take any single event, let's start with a car's engine.

The engine may or may not start each time I try to start it. If it starts then God is merciful and I am in his favor, if it doesn't then the Devil is attacking me. Let's say the engine doesn't start and it causes me to miss some event I think of as important. If I see positive results come out of that missed meeting that I feel most certainly that I am under attack by the devil... Conversely if something bad happens at the meeting then I take that as evidence that God spared me. Finally there are those that, belief in God or no belief in God, say that it is just the way of the world and that these things happen...

So I contemplate all these things around this single instance... And this is what I feel.

God does not affect physical things, except by moving the hearts of man kind. Maybe God calls me to order and maintain my car, maybe he hardens my heart against it... Who is to say? But the opposing side desires us to attribute supernatural powers to everything so that anything can be believed as a sign of his power. For the reasoning follows that if there was a bad event that God saved me from then the badness must have been of the devil and God saw fit to save me from the evil terrible force. As if God is like the French underground in an World War II movie. Powerful but working in secret to thwart the mega powerful villain. This is not so.

God calls my heart to accept with patience and charity and event that occurs from losing a shoe to being martyred. It is my choice to conform to His will, and thus change the course of my life. He calls but we must hear and follow... God cares little, I feel about business meetings, timeliness, car engines, and so much more about how we behave and act as a result. He will give us strength and patience to overcome obstacles and the wisdom to see which hurdles we set for ourselves were unsafe or dangerous.

The opposing side wishes us to believe that God has so little faith and love for us that God, himself must directly interact with physical things to keep us from following what the opposing side wants us to believe is unyielding and unavoidable temptation. Partly because he wants us to defend against the physical things that we *judge* to be sinful so that we spend all our time effort and energy defending against physical things and spending no time placing barriers on the actual place of conflict and that is the spirit. The opposing side is so good at his job of twisting and bending truth that while a man on the exterior may be feeding the poor and conforming to chastity, but on the interior might be a slave to his own pride and vanity about the good works he is doing. He might be so much a slave to these things that he believes with every jesture and movement he is earning ( and sometimes already earned ) a place at the side of Christ.

Christ has told us that he has already prepared a place for us... We just have to go there. He laid out the roadmap, and leaves us to our own to follow that roadmap. He cheers on our every spiritual growth no matter how small, and jumps for joy when that growth flows into the physical and mental world... But our physical success or failure means little. We will always sometimes succeed and sometimes fail and through every chance Christ is standing with us and will help us learn and grow from either outcome. The opposing side however is there too telling us that Christ has already spoken to us in the outcome of the situation and there is no need for further consultation because the evidence is plainly visible in the material world.