I find it intriguing that we want to be so protective of God.

It’s almost as though we know He’ll probably flub up and, if He does, it will make our case to the unbeliever to believe in Him weaker. It may even make us doubt what we believe. So we step into the fray and make excuses for Him before He ever has a chance to step into what we’re asking for.

Take healing, for example.

We all know how it works; someone is sick, suffering, even dying. You pray, you ask others to pray, you pray together, you pray alone, you send out prayer chains. You invest hours, days, weeks; nothing happens. We don’t know why. We come up with the “whys” that cover God’s back: we didn’t have enough faith, we’re being tested, the individual is suffering so his faith can grown, the healing is happening in time or through the medical profession or the big one – it wasn’t in His will to heal the individual. Typically, though, we allow the blame to rest on us.

If the blame falls at God’s feet, then that makes Him either impotent or cruel. We can’t allow that to be thought.

So we come up with Scriptures to prove why He didn’t heal; we make excuses for Him; we preface our petitions with the obligatory “if it is Your will.” When the occasional healing actually occurs, we have a difficult time accepting that it really happened, because that points out how poor our average of success is.

Has it ever dawned on us that it might be us who is messing with the equation? Could it possibly be that we are so frightened of the supernatural that we’re willing to diminish the Almighty so we don’t have to deal with our inability to understand it?