Don't mess with me.

This post is especially angsty, so consider this a warning.

At our ward's last fast and testimony meeting, several people mentioned the "fact" that God sends us our trials.  This can somehow be construed as comforting (see the last post on how everything being "controlled" by God is both deceptively comforting and false [in my opinion]).  When you get down to it though, what kind of a god would be so cruel?  If he is real, he helps us see the benefit that trials can bring, but he doesn't send them to us.

When people in sacrament said that God sends trials and will take them away when we learn enough, I felt anger and the thought that came to my mind was, **language alert**

"Don't f--- with me, God.  Don't you dare f--- with me."  How could you suggeset that God made me this way—altered my brain chemistry— and made me so unable to be happy that I fantasized about death and killing myself?  Cut myself?  Had passive thoughts of death?  Once told my mom, "I just want to die so badly.  Family and friends aren't worth living for."  To hope to die just to figure out if God was even still there and to feel his presence again?  How dare you have the audacity to say that God would screw me over enough just so I could beg to feel him again?

It may bring you comfort to believe that everything happens for a reason, but it's make-believe.

It may sound nice in a select few situations, but when you think of the implications, it's just ghastly.

If there is a god who would do that to me, he does not deserve my worship or obedience.  What kind of heinous being would put me through so much agony just so I could appreciate him more?  "I'm going to ignore you so you'll miss me!" would be the plan.  "I think you're doing fine and doing everything you can to feel my spirit, but now I'm going to take that away just so you don't take it for granted...even though you don't at all."  I would be stupid to continue to follow a deity as flawed as that.

I think of a friend saying that when he practiced teaching in the MTC that the spirit would purposefully withdraw just to show them how they'd do without it.  Um, they probably felt confident, but then little alarm bells went off in their heads because they were being "prideful" and they lost their confidence.  It was Peter falling in the water.  They lacked faith in themselves. 

When I hear explanations like that, it disturbs me deeply because it's so unfair.  Then they would say that life's not fair, that God does what helps us the best.  Well, life isn't fair.  But God is just and doesn't add to that unfairness.  "We need trials to grow."  Yes, naturally-occurring trials, not ones God sends out of the sky like lightening bolts.  Even in the troubling story of Job, it's Satan, not God, who sends Job his trials.  Thinking of a god who would purposefully withdraw his presence just so you missed him just makes me horribly sad.

I remember once praying for patience and then noticing how annoying the people around me were being.  Did God make those people more annoying (i.e. mess with their agency so that they acted differently)?  No, he let me see the opportunity to work on having patience.  Saying that God sends us our trials does not make sense when you compare that hypothetical fathering with earthly parenting (yes, you could say that God is different than earthly parents, but I don't care).  Do parents engineer hardships for their children?  No.  They help them get through them, but do parents somehow make their kids fail tests?  Do they call up classmates and convince them to bully their children so that their children can learn some valuable life lessons?  Please don't tell me that God took away a parent's life so that the child could learn a lesson or gave someone cancer—you will only make me angry.

Maybe it seems nice to believe that once you learn what you needed to that God will "take away" the trial.  But that would lead to withholding sympathy for people because if they only were taking the opportunity to learn from the trial instead of whining, the trial would disappear faster.  "Why should you be sad?  This is a learning experience for you that will help you!"  I remember hearing someone in Sunday school, during a lesson on trials, say that even if something happens like our parents die, we really have no reason to be sad because we'll see them again.  It was a perverse way of "looking on the bright side."  (This is the same person I unfriended on Facebook after he, as his status, asked if next people would be able to marry their dogs when gay marriage became legal in New York.)

There is a huge, huge difference between God sending us a trial so that we can benefit from it and helping us see the good that may come out of a trial which he did not send us.