“How Much Does God Intervene in the World?”

Is the question I asked a couple friends as we sipped coffee at Starbucks. One friend was an agnostic. Another a strong believer. It led to an interesting conversation.

Let me begin by saying, I don’t know how much God intervenes in the world. This is a tale of three friends thinking about life and God.

I meet two friends for tennis and coffee on Saturday mornings. A while back, we gathered around a table at a beehive Starbucks with frothing pitchers clanging, names echoing off the walls, and people grabbing the wrong beverage. While waiting for my oat milk latte, I posed a question: “How much do you think God intervenes in the world?”

I got two reactions. One was, “Seriously, Ken? This early in the morning?”

The other was, “I’m not sure what you mean.”

So, I clarified, ignoring the ‘it’s too early’ - look. “Well, how much do you think God inserts himself in our lives? You know, how much does he reach in and change an outcome? I mean, from the mundane, like answering your prayer for a front-row parking spot at Target, to curing a disease.”

One friend, an avowed agnostic, said, “It doesn’t appear to me that he’s very active. At least not when I look around at the condition of the world.”

“Okay,” I said. “So, does that mean a little intervention? Or never at all?”

He settled on, “Never at all.” Then he concluded with, “Here’s how I see it, God threw the ball in to start the game, and now he’s waiting around to see what’s gonna happen.”

“Is that your final answer?” I joked.

He nodded.

My other friend said, “Well, he seems to intervene a lot with me, personally, I mean. He answers a lot of my prayers, but he doesn’t seem to answer my prayers about the condition of the world.”

“Okay,” I said. “So, is that a ‘yes’? He does intervene and he does so a lot, even if it is mostly on a personal level?”

He agreed to that.

Then the attention turned to me for my answer. “Okay, I said, but first a couple other questions and then I’ll give you my answer. First of all, ‘About how long was Jesus active on earth?’”

They crinkled their foreheads, ‘Huh?’

“About three years,” I said. “And in those three years, how many miracles do you think he performed? Keep in mind,” I held my finger in the air, “he had the power to intervene and cure and make the world right for anyone he wanted to, at any time he wanted to.”

They thought about it and then shrugged.

“About 40 times. That’s how many miracles/interventions are recorded in the Bible. (And yes, I realize there were probably many more—but suffice to say, Jesus didn’t right a fallen world.) So, in 36 months of active ministry, you could say he altered the natural order of things about once a month.”

I thought they would scratch their heads and give me a wry, that’s-an-interesting-observation smile. But no. They just stared blankly.

“Think about it. God on earth; had the power to heal anything he wanted; could have made the world of his day ‘right.’ But he chose restraint. He didn’t heal everyone and make the fallen unfallen. No, he existed within a broken world, with all its problems and pain, and decidedly did not undo it. Yes, he healed. Yes, he answered prayer. But not in a neurotic, frantic, interventionist sort of way.”

“And…?” one asked.

“Well, maybe that’s a good model for how God is today. Once a monthish…not literally of course. But he is discreet, restrained, and, on occasion, will disrupt the natural order of things. He’s not meddlesome or disruptive or frenetic or, as one preacher put it, ‘intervening a million times a second to exercise his will.’

I waited for a response from my friends. Would it be ‘Aha’, or maybe ‘Hallelujah.’

Nope. I got courteous head nods. Within a few seconds we were back to talking about why my oat milk latte was taking so long.

I have to admit, though, this is the kind of thing I think about...like, all the time. It speaks to how God runs the universe. It speaks to how free will intersects with his will. It speaks to how bad things happen to good people. And maybe most of all—at least for me—it affects how much I pray and what I pray about.

This once-a-monthish kind of God (which I had kind of adopted) had me praying a lot less. Why bother him with the frivolous? Why ask for intervention when it is unlikely?

After the Starbucks conversation, something changed for me. I found myself staring at the stars one night, thinking about images of the universe I'd seen from the James Webb telescope. I envisioned earth's tiny place in the cosmos and I was humbled; I felt so insignificant, so vulnerable. On one hand I was ecstatic that I could comprehend the nearly incomprehensible. But on the other, sobered by how much little old me mattered and how much little old me could comprehend.

Yeah...a typical night of stargazing for me."

And it was in this state of mind that I thought: ‘I don’t know the ways of God. How am I supposed to grasp the balance between free will and his will? Sure, to me they seem to be opposing forces which are utterly irreconcilable. But what do I know? I don’t know how he reconciles things. I don’t know how he runs the universe. Why am I trying to outsmart God?’

In this state of gnat-like understanding, I defaulted to my own agnosticism. I just don’t know.

Maybe God does intervene a lot. Maybe not. Either way, I've decided I'm just going to pray for and about everything. I'm going to pray for the premium parking spot in front of LA Fitness; I'm going to pray for my grandson's soul; I'm going to pray for that commission. I'm going to have an ongoing dialogue with the creator as if I were the only person on the planet.

And to the outsider, to you my dear reader, this little partnership, this little ongoing dialogue I have with God, may appear to you as mere fancy, or child's play, or the height of naivete. But it works for me; it feels right to me; it's my little reverse cynicism. Yes, cynicism in reverse. Because cynicism is something fighting against—I’d like to be a little more glassy-eyed.

So, did God throw the ball in to start the game and then take off? I don’t think so.

Did God throw the ball in and start batting it around a million times a second? I don’t think so.

Thus, the mystery of God.

And as to the oat milk latte, it did eventually come and man was it an answer to prayer. No, actually it was just good.

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