Stop Blaming God for Your Miserable Life

I am not a religious person. The boundaries of religion feel too confining at times. This may seem surprising coming from someone who attended Catholic school from kindergarten through college, but in my school days I was still digesting whatever holy concepts were being fed to me without thinking about what really resonated with me.

I do consider myself a spiritual person in the sense that I believe in a Higher Power that flows through us all. I just tend not to think of this Power as resembling a human being or belonging to a specific “gender”. We’ve all seen paintings portraying God as an older white male with a beard, kind of like a more chiseled Santa Claus. I find it a bit vain believing that a superior being must appear in our likeness.

With that being said, I’ve been struggling with my own sense of spirituality as of late. Thankfully, I’ve gotten myself back to a point where I pray, because for a while I got frustrated and stopped. After growing weary from not getting what I wanted out of life, I decided to go silent and pout like a child who didn’t get the toy they desired for their birthday. I’m still waiting on my Cabbage Patch Kid.

Most of us who believe in a supreme being has had at least one moment in their life where they became frustrated because their prayers seemed to go unanswered. But turning away from the Higher Power is just a symptom of the difficulty we face when trying to love unconditionally. How many times have we withheld love because a romantic partner made us upset or didn’t do something we wanted them to do?

I once lived with someone who got pissed at me after an argument, and when he cooked dinner that night, he made plates of food for himself and our kids, and nothing for me. We treat our Creator in the same way sometimes. We find it more comfortable to love when it’s convenient.

It’s easier to believe that everything is out of our hands and that we have no choice when it comes to our life circumstances. Because when things go wrong, then we don’t have to blame ourselves. But I tend to believe that we make our own decisions in life, and we get to live with the results of those decisions, good or bad.

Just because we are responsible for molding our life, that doesn’t mean that prayer is useless. I believe that putting out good intentions into the Universe changes things. Whether your prayers are actually answered, or they just change the way you view your circumstances, hope always feels better than fear. When you have hope, you are still willing to take action and move towards the thing that you want. Fear can make you stand still.

We are quickly becoming a society that values instant gratification. Unwilling to be patient and have faith that we can have the things that we desire, we give up and take it out on the world around us. Putting in sincere effort is no longer honorable, we want what we want NOW without having to do the necessary work. Not only are we losing confidence in God, we are losing confidence in ourselves.

No one will get every single thing that they want out of life, and that’s what makes it interesting and full of surprises. Take heart if you are going through a rough patch, no situation lasts forever. Even if there are times when you feel like it’s impossible to love, make sure that you continue to make a plate for The Creator at your table, no matter what comes your way.

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