One thing that irritates me about people of Christian faith sometimes: the belief that if you only had a stronger/better relationship with Jesus/God, then all your problems would go away. For instance, I read in my paper's religion section the other day, about a Christian speaker saying she used to have agoraphobia until she started having a better relationship with God.
Give me a freakin' break.
It's this whole 'health and wealth' gospel going on. The speaker talks about how God 'brought her to a place of greater soundness and stability' (and it goes on, and on, and on).
Now, I realize that I wasn't there in person to hear this malarkey, but this is another reason I'm so glad I'm Catholic. A friend and I were talking about this the other night over drinks. She brought up the fact that she's so glad she is Catholic because when she was fighting depression over a year ago (at her Protestant college), she would get this "If only you had a better relationship with God, you'd be healed" garbage, and that made her feel only worse about herself. Then we had this discussion about how, with the Catholic faith, we're like, "Dude, go get that checked out. Something's physically wrong."
I'm not saying that miraculous things don't happen, and I'm not saying that medicine has all the answers. But usually with your health, don't you think it kinda makes sense to get a physical (and start praying too, but that's a side deal) - before you start the good ole-fashioned guilt trips on yourself?
Prayer is never a side deal. The thing is, Catholics believe it's a both-and -- asking God for help and using what He's given us down here -- rather than an either-or.
ReplyDeleteThe other thing is we actually know the point of the Book of Job (well, those of us who know the Faith and aren't simply culturally Catholic), whether we read it or not, whereas Protestants talk about reading the Bible but tend to just interpret a (relatively) few verses out of context while overlooking the rest. So you get this prosperity gospel crap from them even though they should have noticed that God lets bad things happen to good, devout people.
The point, I guess, is more prayer for God to help you change the things you can and accept that the things you can't are still for His glory at the end of the day, and less anything for our own glory or for presumption that He'll make us all prosperous in this life.
I understand what you mean about prayer never a side deal...I should have used both/and but that phrase wasn't occurring to me at the time. lol. You definitely hit the nail on the head with "even though they should have noticed that God lets bad things happen to good, devout people." Amen, brother.
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