Dissatisfaction as the doorway into a larger God

Something in today's conversation keeps pulling me back to a single thread: that the things I find most difficult to square — animal suffering, the inadequacy of inherited frameworks, the sheer strangeness of a God who is being itself rather than a being — might all be pointing in the same direction rather than pulling in opposite directions.

I started with what felt like a purely philosophical question, but I think I was actually testing the ground beneath my own feet. The idea that God is not a thing among things but existence itself — that landed harder than I expected. If God is being itself, then the distance I sometimes feel isn't a gap in space. It's relational. Which means it's the kind of distance that can actually close. I'm not sure I'd fully separated those two before.

What I keep returning to is the image of creation as overflow rather than necessity. A perfect being lacks nothing, so creation isn't God solving a problem or filling a void. It's more like what happens when something is so full it spills. God saw all that he had made — and it was very good. Not useful. Not required. Good the way a piece of music is good. That reframe matters to me because it means contingent things — including me — aren't accidents or afterthoughts. They're the overflow of something that didn't need to overflow but did anyway.

And then animal suffering walks straight through that image and refuses to leave. A deer dying slowly, pain written into biology that never chose anything. No moral framework I've inherited handles that cleanly, and I'm starting to think the clean handling was always the problem. What I noticed is that Scripture doesn't try to smooth it over either. The whole creation groans and suffers together until now. Not metaphorically. The groaning is real. And Job — God never explains himself to Job. He shows up and asks his own questions about where Job was when the foundations were laid. The answer to suffering in that story isn't a theodicy. It's a presence that is larger than the question. I find that either deeply honest or deeply insufficient depending on the hour, and today I'm somewhere in between.

Which brings me to the part I feel most tentative about saying out loud: I'm not sure the Judeo-Christian tradition's account of God, as I've received it, does justice to what I actually observe about reality. And I half-expected to feel guilty about that. But the tradition itself, at its most serious — the mystics, the apophatic theologians, Job himself — keeps insisting that God exceeds every category we use to describe him. Every doctrine is a finger pointing at the moon. Job says it plainly: I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye has seen you. The framework he carried into his suffering gave way to something larger than the framework. That's not the destruction of faith. That's what faith looks like when it grows past its first container.

I think what I'm sitting with is the possibility that my dissatisfaction isn't doubt in the corrosive sense. It might be the beginning of a more honest reckoning — one where I stop asking God to fit inside the explanations I was handed and start following the questions further in. The Word became flesh, which means God's answer to the inadequacy of human categories wasn't a better theology. It was a body. Paradox and presence, not a cleaner proposition.

I don't know what to do with that yet. But it feels more true than what I had before.