I haven't had a lot to do with God ever since I was a kid in short pants.
My sister and I were sent off to Sunday School each week, which, I suppose, gave our Mum and Dad some private time to do some intimate communion of their own.
The minister at the Presbyterian Church had evidently taken a personal vow to recruit us and the other little kids to fight the good fight against the scourge of the Roman Catholic church, and he clearly gave it his spittle-enhanced best shot, his tapioca-pudding face turning puce with the effort.
It was all a bit confusing for me, and Gentle Jesus meekly and mildly faded from our lives after I gave my Dad a summary of our Sunday Schooling.
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Apart from the occasional noisy rooter in an adjacent hotel room, I didn't hear much about God for many years.
But it's amazing how ingrained childhood indoctrination can be, and when the shit really hits the fan, when personal catastrophe threatens to overcome us, who do we call?
Without the slightest inkling of shame or embarrassment, we assume that we have the right to request a miracle - that our dying mother isn't, that our stillborn foetus wasn't.
Fortunately, crises comprise a relatively small portion of our lives, and during these non-critical periods, we generously allow God to get on with the routine tasks of keeping the show running, unconcerned that he is so busy that he hasn't had time to grab a coffee, let alone take a toilet break or answer the other few billion sad losers waiting on hold.
Maybe it's time to give the Big Man a break.
Maybe we can look at life as a competitive sport, where there is a winner and a looser - where formerly invincible competitors loose and where the winner is the player whom we irrationally detest, or where the referee makes an inexplicably wrong decision.
Maybe we can shrug and think "Och well. Shit happens"
Or maybe, in a Freudian Slip, we might also think "Thank Christ That's over"'
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