Is God Sovereign?

I'm writing this post, in answer to somebody asking on another (closed) forum about the sovereignty of God, from my mother's hospital room.

The question was this (with author's permission):

Not just the canned answers - what does "God is sovereign" really mean, and what do you base the conclusion of it on? What do you observe around you that builds up that belief?

If not for having read it in the Bible and so knowing you are supposed to believe it, would you come to the same conclusion simply from observations in your own life and that of others right now?

help me out here. I sometimes feel like these are just words people say, so they seem empty, or maybe I don't understand the code they are using, or....something.

Mom's a few hours out from exploratory surgery that discovered her abdominal cavity is riddled with cancer.

I've known a lot of people who were full of life, almost vibrating with spirit and with love: she outstripped most of them, and I was saying so back in high school when I told my stoner friends that they weren't as much fun as my parents.

Now she's looking... barely there. Translucent. I can see the tension on her face every time some sudden noise breaks the pump-and-monitor chirrup and hum of the hospital. Every time a nurse explodes (nurses do not speak: they explode silences), I see her brow tighten beneath her surgical cap.

We're all gathering, the family. My sister is in a car, my brother is booking a flight. We're waiting on the oncologist to explode the silence and tell us what the future will be. Some events make time stand still, make it hard to breathe.

If Death is God, then God is sovereign.

It's the one thing you can be dead sure of.

But it's not worth worshiping.

The place fills up quickly with Christians. They come in various forms: fools, tentative friends, people obligated by love or faith or duty to shuffle through looking as though they wished they could say something.

They do stupid things: mom hasn't slept enough, has just had her abdomen opened to the light, and been stitched together again, but they feel better if they touch her and pray out loud. I want to tell them, "Jesus, people. Go talk to God outside if you have to talk to him out loud. It's not like vibrations in the air make him real or something. Stop trying to conjure him." Paganism is what it is.

But it keeps coming.

And it's suffused with a foolish, almost childish, love.

It's trying to hold on and to let go, trying to give and receive, and it doesn't know how.

But it's worth worshiping.

Death is not sovereign over such things: it will have the last word, maybe, if there is no resurrection of the dead: but it cannot crush the independence, the heart, the spirit that it takes to come to a hospital and to touch a husband on the shoulder or embrace a son or to bring coffee or to show up at six in the morning so the family can get a little much-needed sleep and the patient won't worsen alone.

It takes enormous spirit to be there, to say "You are not alone, and though you will die, by God you aren't dead yet, and we who are living are with you, holding you in the company of the living."

What if you said, "Whatever God is, I don't care. That's what I'm going to worship, that indomitable shout of existence in the very jaws of non-existence that is where we all live"?

It's sovereign for you, in the way that a whistled tune is sovereign to the slave, or an obstinate silence is for the captive by the rivers of Babylon when his sovereign captors demanded songs. 

Comments

[Susan in the Boonies]

I am desperately sorry you are going through this, among all the rest of the crap on your plate.

If it weren't a sin to kick an otter when he's down, I'd kick your butt for not telling me you have a blog.

But I am not a otter kicker.

I love the otter.

Praying for you. Praying for your Mom.

[Otter]

Thanks, Susan. Actually, Touchstone is doing most of the heavy lifting. I'm with mom right now in the hospital.

[Jennifer in AZ]

I had thought out my reply but it was trite and well, unhelpful (is that a word?)....I wish I had real help to offer. I'll pray for the Otter clan and especially for the dear lady I think of as "Grandma Otter". That may be trite, but at least it is heartfelt and sincere.