When God Dies

Martin Luther once spent three days in a black depression over something that had gone wrong. On the third day his wife came downstairs dressed in mourning clothes. “Who’s dead?” he asked her. “God,” she replied. Luther rebuked her, saying, “What do you mean, God is dead? God cannot die.” “Well,” she replied, “the way you’ve been acting I was sure He had!”

Many of us have been caught in that trap. When things don’t go our way we act as though God were dead. If an election doesn’t go our way, we don’t get a raise at work, someone is unnecessarily rude to us, or we are just having a bad day, we can give the impression to others that God is dead. Ask yourself: Have I ever been in that kind of mood and why?

Like the great reformer Luther we will quickly say, “God cannot die”, but it would help if we acted as though we believed that to be true. We should be the people and hope and light that bring joy to the world. Try being that kind of person.