January 27, 1999

COMMENTARY:
Just who do we think God is, anyway?
___By Dale Hanson Bourke
___Religion News Service
___The older I get, the more I realize I just don't understand God at all.
___One thing I do understand: God is so much bigger than I give him credit for that it must give

DALE HANSON BOURKE

him a holy migraine just to diminish his greatness enough so I can have a passing glimpse.
___The corollary is that I am so limited in my understanding--or perhaps in my faith-- that mostly I am happy to attribute to God what I see through a reflective lens, extrapolating my extremely limited view of the world to the Creator's vision of the universe.
___And that is a perfect way to get myself in trouble.
___So, I look for clues from other people--those who may have better holy vision or more sensitive souls.
___For example, the birth of the octuplets in Houston provided an opportunity to learn more about God. Each baby was named for an attribute of God by Iyke Louis Udobi and his wife, Nkem Chukwu.
___They both seemed humble and grateful, attributing their blessings to God.
___When asked if they considered "selective reduction," destroying some of the embryos to give others a better chance, they were confident. "I wasn't even going to give it a thought," Chukwu said. "I've never seen such a word in the Bible."
___I want to ask them--and I'm not facetious--"How did you decide to have fertility treatments, then? That isn't covered in the Bible either."
___See, what I really wonder about is just when we humans are supposed to mess in God's business.
___I have a friend who is a brilliant woman but chooses to ignore modern medicine entirely because she is a Christian Scientist. Another friend believes God has given us the latest medical advances and we should use every one of them and "give God the glory," as she says.
___The focus on these questions usually comes on either end of life.
___But I don't want to wait for ethicists to rule on what is right and wrong. By the time they work it out, hundreds of individuals will have made agonizing personal decisions that may fall on the wrong side of the code they establish.
___I want to know more about who God is and how much he wants us to trust him. After all, if we believe God is all-powerful, when do we end our pathetic acts of intervention, get on our knees and pray? If we believe God is all-knowing, when do we stop our research and cry out for a miracle? If we believe God is omnipresent, then when do we stop our efforts to fly a doctor in to an emergency situation and instead ask the God who we believe already is there to pull out his ultimate doctor's kit and breath life back into the victim?
___Mostly, how do we make those decisions when they come down to our own life or that of someone we love?
___How do we decide when God is saying no or when he is challenging us to try a little harder on our own?
___I'm not the only one who has more questions than answers, more ambiguity than clarity. So, to all you clergy out there, could we get back to the basics? Could you cancel some sermons on current issues and concentrate on that most basic issue of all: Just who do we think God is, anyway?

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