God’s Minor Inconveniences? What the Hell!?
This was a Facebook post from August 20, in response to a well-intentioned pastor offering her interpretation on minor inconveniences. It was bullshit with a cherry on top.
August 20, 2025: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1LSLrXAeyu/
It seems that every year since 2001, as we near September, certain stories circulate. They are stories about 9/11 survivors who lived because of minor inconveniences: a child who was slow to get ready, a missed bus, a spilled coffee, and even a blister from new shoes. The moral is simple: next time you’re delayed, don’t be angry — maybe God is protecting you.
I understand why this story appeals. It gives shape to randomness, comforting us with the idea that interruptions and frustrations are divinely arranged. But there’s a spiritual immaturity in this way of thinking. It reduces tragedy and survival alike to a tidy lesson, as if God spares some because of a traffic jam while abandoning thousands of others to die. That kind of theology trivializes grief and turns God into an arbitrary dispenser of luck.
And it ignores the other side of the story: the countless times when delay or inconvenience leads not to safety but to harm. Someone misses one train and boards the one that derails. Someone pauses to answer a call and ends up in an accident they would have avoided seconds earlier. A surgery is postponed, and a patient dies waiting. If we claim divine protection in survival, then we must also claim divine neglect in these outcomes. That isn’t faith. That’s superstition in religious clothing.
So what might a more mature faith — or a wiser spirituality, for those outside any faith — look like? It begins with honesty. Life is unpredictable, fragile, and often unfair. Sometimes interruptions spare us. Sometimes they harm us. Often, they frustrate us. There is no hidden moral in every twist of timing. But there is the invitation to live well with unpredictability.
That means practicing patience when life doesn’t move on our schedule. It means holding gratitude for what is present without assuming our blessings were divinely prioritized over another’s losses. It means choosing solidarity with those who suffer, rather than trying to explain away their pain with shallow theology. And it means letting delays, frustrations, and grief remind us of our shared vulnerability — the ground from which humility and compassion can grow.
For some, prayer can be one way of centring in this reality — not as a magic bullet for protection or miracles, but as a practice of opening ourselves to patience, honesty, and care. For others, it may be a pause, a deep breath, a commitment to presence. What matters is not the form, but the spirit: that we don’t shrink tragedy into a lesson or sanctify luck as divine favour, but instead respond to life’s unpredictability with wisdom and compassion.
So the next time you hit every red light or spill your coffee, don’t tell yourself that God has spared you from disaster. Let it remind you instead of the truth we all share: that life is uncertain, that each of us is fragile, and that the best we can do is meet one another with patience, humility, and care along the way.
