I think God is a peer.

The older student who sits in the front row of your community college class. The one you regard with a formal kind of reverence, and with an undue amount of skepticism. Whose story you don’t know and you make up instead of asking.

And then one day, you get it. And they wink at you like they’ve been waiting for you to catch up – like they’re glad you’re finally, finally in on it all.

You see, I’m under no impression that I have world-building power, big bang-caliber force. I don’t believe that, toe to toe, God and I are equals. But I think spiritually, once you boil down the semantics, the pure product that you’re left with is the essence of us all. And I don’t believe that God and I are on worshipping terms. I don’t think they want my fealty, my obedience, my blind faith. I believe that God wants my understanding.

You see, I don’t believe that God has a plan for us all – I think they have a hope. I believe that God sees a body and a heart and a soul with the potential to be filled with a thousand worthwhile, hard-won things – and I think God hopes that we fill ourselves to the brim. With experiences, encounters, emotions, growth. That in the span of our lives, we avail ourselves of this opportunity to sharpen our humanity, hone our humility, to learn all that we can, and to be the purest form of what we are.

So we are not released with a roadmap – God is not upstairs paving paths. We are sent here with essence of what we are and all the opportunity to build that into something nuanced, and robust, and fully-formed. It’s a hope, it’s not a plan. There is no co-signer on our choices, our tragedies, our triumphs. What we do here is all us, and that’s by design.

And so there are bad people, then, who do bad things. It is not God’s will that we kill and we make war and we starve others while we starve ourselves on purpose. Those people arrived here with the same opportunity we did – to make choices – and so there is no logic behind our atrocities, no bigger thing that they ladder up to, there are only choices.

I’d like to think some kind of judgement still exists – somedays I have to just to console my mind – that life is not a blank check we can cash in indiscriminately. Those of us who chose our humanity win even as we lose, but those who choose themselves cannot finish ahead even as they win. I must believe that. But what we all must believe more stalwartly is that somethings just are. No plan, no divine intervention – these things happen whether they test the bounds of our logic or our consciences. Some people will never meet their justice and some things will never feel easier to stomach. It is what it is, not part of something greater.

Because God is but a peer. Sitting in the front row of this classroom not to learn, but to watch what lights the students up. To witness the revelations that make them who they are, to wink at the people who finally, finally get it. There is no grand plan, to get to a life beyond this one. There is no purpose you brought into this world, no gospel to rebuke all else in favor of. The point is life, the point is your sadness, the point is your grief, the point is your changed mind, the point is all that wasted time. You experience the point of all of this while you curse in traffic, while you laugh with a stranger, while you utter testimony over roadkill.

God is not your cartographer and he is not your keeper. God is you.