Not God’s Plan. God’s Problem.
Why surrender without responsibility isn’t faith, and why Sunday was never meant to be anesthetic
Sunday Isn’t Settling Anymore
Sunday is supposed to settle people.
It’s the day we’re encouraged to lower our shoulders, soften our questions, and tell ourselves that whatever didn’t make sense during the week will somehow make sense again if we light a candle, sing a hymn, or scroll a little slower.
Lately, that’s not happening.
Instead, Sunday feels like the loneliest day to be honest.
The day when people are most tempted to explain away what still hurts, still frightens, still doesn’t sit right in the gut.
That’s when the phrase comes out.
“It’s all part of God’s plan.”
I don’t doubt the sincerity behind it.
I don’t doubt the comfort it brings.
I don’t even doubt the love behind the person saying it.
But I do doubt what that sentence does to us when we repeat it long enough.
Because some sentences soothe.
And some sentences relocate responsibility.
And this one does both.
Surrender vs. Abdication
There are moments when surrender is wisdom.
And moments when surrender is abdication.
Faith traditions don’t always teach the difference clearly.
Surrender, at its best, loosens the grip of ego. It reminds us we are not the center of the universe, not the authors of everything that happens, not entitled to control the arc of reality.
But abdication does something else.
It hands agency away at precisely the moment agency matters most.
When we say “this is God’s plan,” we quietly smuggle in a second belief:
That what is happening could not be otherwise.
That resistance is cosmetic.
That responsibility is optional.
And once responsibility becomes optional, cruelty finds cover.
The Cost of Calling Everything “Planned”
Here’s the part that doesn’t get said often enough.
If everything unfolding around us is planned, then nothing is interruptible.
Not injustice.
Not violence.
Not indifference.
Not systems that grind people down while congratulating themselves for stability.
A God who scripts suffering and then watches humans call it holy is not a God of mercy. That is a God of insulation.
And insulation is very useful if you are overwhelmed, afraid, or trying to keep a small world intact while a larger one fractures.
I understand why people reach for it.
But I can’t call it faith.
Sunday Was a Disruption, Not a Sedative
Sunday was never meant to be a day for sleepwalking.
Despite how it’s often packaged now, Sunday didn’t originate as a spiritual sedative. It was a disruption. A refusal to let the week’s logic be the final word. A pause that sharpened attention rather than dulling it.
Prophets didn’t soothe people into acceptance.
They agitated them into awareness.
Jesus didn’t say, “Relax, Rome is part of the plan.”
He said, in a hundred indirect ways, “Pay attention to what you’re doing to one another.”
Mystics didn’t dissolve responsibility.
They intensified it.
They didn’t surrender agency.
They surrendered self-deception.
That distinction matters.
The Ache Between Love and Conscience
A lot of us are living with a quiet ache right now.
We love people who are using faith to survive this moment.
And we are using conscience to stay human inside it.
Those two things can coexist.
But they are not the same thing.
One prioritizes personal peace.
The other prioritizes moral participation.
And history doesn’t move because enough people felt comforted.
It moves because some people stayed awake.
That work rarely looks dramatic. It looks like conversations that don’t end cleanly. Phone calls that leave you wrung out. Kitchens where everyone agrees to keep talking even though it hurts. Witness without winning.
That is not rebellion.
That is responsibility refusing to outsource itself.
Mystery Is Not Moral Bypass
I’m not allergic to mystery.
I don’t need a universe where everything is explainable, controllable, or narratively satisfying. I actually think humility begins when we admit how much we don’t know.
But mystery is not the same thing as moral bypass.
Mystery says, “I don’t know how this ends.”
Bypass says, “I don’t need to act.”
And those are opposites.
If there is a God worth trusting, that trust does not require us to stop responding to suffering. It requires us to stop pretending suffering is someone else’s problem.
Which brings me to the sentence I keep circling back to.
Maybe this isn’t God’s plan.
Maybe it’s God’s problem.
And maybe the scandal of faith has always been that God refuses to solve that problem without us.
What Sunday Might Still Be For
If Sunday has any meaning left, maybe it’s this.
Not rest as avoidance.
Not peace as anesthesia.
But rest as reorientation.
A day to remember that surrender does not mean disappearing.
That trust does not mean disengaging.
That humility does not mean helplessness.
Blessed are the restless on Sunday.
The ones who can’t quite sing the easy answers anymore.
The ones whose faith still has friction in it.
The ones who refuse to confuse calm with conscience.
They are not losing belief.
They are losing the illusion that belief was ever meant to excuse us from responsibility.
And that might be the most honest form of worship left.
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YES. Thank you for stating it so perfectly and clearly and making it so very real. A lot of religions, not just the mainstream ones, are putting that message out, that this has to happen because it's our karma or some BS of that nature (I seriously think Karma was invented by the privileged few to control the struggling many, just like every other religion). Malarkey. Whoever one believes "God" might be, They need our help to fix this. We're supposed to contain little bits of God inside us, so let's use 'em.
In our way, surrender has never meant stepping aside from life. It has meant standing inside it with care.
Dharma is not escape. It is the daily work of choosing right action, even when the outcome is unclear. Especially then.
What cannot be controlled is accepted. What can be touched is tended. Both belong to the same prayer.
A day of rest is not a day of forgetting.
It is a day to realign the heart so action stays clean.
That is worship here.