Wrestling with God

For decades, I have wrestled with God. I am no nearer a resolution than when I began.

Written by Bo Winegard.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. That was my first effort to understand eternity and, therefore, my first effort to understand God. I do not remember how old I was, but, having been taught a kind of amorphous Christianity by my parents, I took the existence of God and life after death for granted. The precepts and dogmas did not particularly move me; what riveted me was eternity.

My young mind could not grasp a timeless reality, so I tried to conceive eternity as a series of days that never ended, one followed by another, and so on without limit. But this perplexed me. Surely everything must end; how could anything simply go on forever? And yet life after death was said to be eternal, and the eternal, by its very definition, does not end.

Each day then must be followed by another like an endless string of beads. But again the question returned: how could the beads continue forever? I pictured taking the beads off one after another but then realized that eventually I would have a gargantuan and ever-growing pile of beads with a still endless string ahead of me. The more I tried to imagine it, the more vexing it became. My mind was caught in one of those devious traps in which the harder one struggles to escape, the more firmly fixed one becomes.

For a long time, I did not resolve this tension. Being naturally skeptical, I was no dogmatic believer. Yet I accepted some vague outline of Christianity and found the thought of an omnipotent deity comforting, even if I could not fathom him. At the same time, being naturally neurotic, I feared damnation and struggled to subdue sinful thoughts. I would often feel a blasphemy rising to mind and then try to repress it, curse it, deny it, lest my soul be imperiled by my own iniquity. Some nights I lay awake for hours in an excruciating loop. An insult to Jesus would pop in my head followed by a contrite attempt to propitiate through praise followed by another insult.

The fear of hell haunted me.