The truth is, none of those things—job, health, family, friends, novels, and chocolate—are stable without God in the picture anyway. Atheists and Agnostics lose these things and fear losing them too; religious saints and religious sinners suffer pretty near the same fates in terms of pain, as far as I can tell. So there’s no point in backing away from God out of a fear that He’ll “require” tough stuff of you.
Tough stuff is required of everybody. It’s called life.
In fact, I’ve said it before—I believe on this blog—that the older I get the more increasingly convinced I’ve become that life is so hard that the only way to be happy and good—to be the sort of person Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and Thomas More and Francis de Sales would give a thumbs up to—is with God’s help.
The tough stuff comes, regardless of your relationship to God or lack thereof. And that should suggest one of two things.
Either it’s all about the tough stuff, and God’s failure to intervene in preventing it, or at least to provide appropriate exhalations in exchange for it, proves his indifference or nonexistence.
Or the tough stuff actually is a pretty miniscule thing compared to … the whole picture. Whatever the whole picture happens to be.
Eye hath not seen, and all that.
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