Suffice it to say I have a problem which literally cannot be solved by mortal means (with other issues stemming from it that make it worse). Only the divine can fix it. What I get from God instead of actual help is essentially a pat on the head or a (totally not) comforting word about his caring and love (or control, or plans, or anything else that doesn’t change the situation in the slightest).
Brother, I hear you and validate your question. I don't know. sometimes we seem to get help and sometimes we do not. I think that is where the story of Job struggles with the issue also. The message there is that we cannot hold God accountable. God is inscrutable and we do not like that. It brings us always to the central question: Can I continue to believe in God's goodness and love or can I no longer do so?
We tend to want to anthropomorphize God, like a parent. But God is very far beyond such a concept. I was reading from the Cloud of Unknowing yesterday, a Christian classic.
Chapter 4
Do not think that because I call it a 'darkness ' or a 'cloud' it is the sort of cloud you see in the sky, or the kind of darkness you know at home when the light is out. That kind of darkness or cloud you can picture in your mind's eye in the height of summer, just as in the depth of a winter's night you can picture a clear and shining light. I do not mean this at all. By 'darkness' I mean 'a lack of knowing' -just as anything that you do not know or may have forgotten may be said to be 'dark' to you, for you cannot see it with your inward eye. For this reason it is called 'a cloud', not of the sky, of course, but ' of unknowing', a cloud of unknowing between you and your God.
6 But now you will ask me, 'How am I to think of God himself, and what is he?' and I cannot answer you except to say 'I do not know!' For with this question you have brought me into the same darkness, the same cloud of unknowing where I want you to be ! For though we through the grace of God can know fully about all other matters, and think about them - yes, even the very works of God himself - yet of God himself can no man think. Therefore I will leave on one side everything I can think, and choose for my love that thing which I cannot think! Why? Because he may well be loved, but not thought. By love he can be caught and held, but by thinking never. Therefore, though it may he good sometimes to think particularly about God's kindness and worth, and though it may be enlightening too, and a part of contemplation, yet in the work now before us it must be put down and covered with a cloud of forgetting. And you are to step over it resolutely and eagerly, with a devout and kindling love, and try to penetrate that darkness above you. Strike that thick cloud of unknowing with the sharp dart of longing love, and on no account whatever think of giving up.
http://avalonlibrary.net/ebooks/Anonymous - The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works.pdf
Like it or not, and however we might think we know, God is beyond.
