Goodness, God and Me
Simple thoughts on how I perceive goodness in this crazy world.
I really truly wanted to be the kind of person that saw God in the littlest of things. The person that saw God in Nature, in the mundane, and in the complex, in the coincidences and circularities. I wanted to be able to appreciate God’s hand in everything (especially everything good!). I wanted my life to be a testimony of God’s goodness. But somehow now I’ve lost a lot of that. I’m still optimistic to an extent; I’m not completely cynical. I love to believe that all humans harbour some good within themselves (even though some of y’all really be showing yourselves). Significantly, I think people can be good without God. I think whether you attribute good to God or not, it’s there. It’s not any better because it comes from God. Good things happen because people are good, and because there is good in the world! Whether or not that goodness comes from God is inconsequential to me. I am thankful to the source of that goodness when I can see them. And when I can’t? Well, I thank myself for seeing and experiencing the good. That in itself is deserving of celebration in a world where it is easy to always be distracted by the bad.
So, where do I place God you may ask? I don’t know yet. I’m still discovering this land I’m sitting in- between stoic agnosticism and actively believing in spiritual beings. God exists to me but I think I’m still working on deciding if I want to delve into a relationship. I don’t know what that relationship looks like. I can picture what I expect from a romantic partner, or a friend or a sibling but with God, I’m just not sure what I want to ascribe to them, good or bad. This does not make me feel guilty. And no one can preach this away from me. I am as okay with this as seeing a stranger in a restaurant and dispassionately wondering what their life is about.
For now, I am okay believing that God exists, but they don’t determine whether someone is good. Or whether good things happen. Though “Thank God” is often involuntarily in my mouth as a response to good things, I acknowledge the presence of goodness in the world, in me and in others, even without God.
