When God tests us

In The Purpose-Driven Life, Rick Warren writes:

To mature your friendship, God will test it with periods of seeming separation--times when it feels as if He has abandoned or forgotten you....[T]his feeling of abandonment or estrangement from God has nothing to do with sin. It is a test of faith.

I don't believe that. I don't believe that God goes out of His way to make bad things happen to us so that we'll pull closer to Him. A lot of the bad things are self-inflicted. I don't take care of my body and then I have medical problems. I don't put out at work and I get laid off. These are things that we do, and the bad things that follow them aren't from God. They are the natural consequences of our actions.

But sometimes, the problems just happen. When I got laid off, it was because I worked in an industry that had gone insane and needed a correction. The nature of life is such that bad things are sometimes going to happen.

It is also the nature of life that sometimes, God will feel distant. It could be that we're not where we're supposed to be. But it could also be that life gets busy and sometimes it takes everything just to keep up. Either way, God doesn't teach to be dependent on Him by withdrawing from us. If that teaches us anything, it's how to become more self-reliant. Sometimes things just happen.

There's a great danger in these conversations of falling into a black-and-white construct in which everything good comes from God and everything bad comes from us. Just as sometimes bad things are our fault and sometimes they aren't; sometimes good things come from God and sometimes they're the result of our own creativeness and hard work.

God is the one who provided talents and a situation in which we can and should use them. But when we use them and do the right thing, we can feel a certain satisfaction of accomplishment.

In short, God is not a puppetmaster, and neither has He created a circumstance where we can only fail. Finally, He doesn't test us just to see how much we measure up. He is our loving father and is always as close by as our asking.