EDITORIAL
How Does God Work in the World?

Michael A. King

How does God work in the world? The first set of articles in this issue of DreamSeeker Magazine explicitly ask variations of that question. The second set might be read as asking it implicitly.

As she ponders how God works in response to prayer, Kirsten Beachy’s version of the question becomes "Is that all?" Then Jana Alderfer sees evidence that God’s work includes answered prayers amid a son’s great physical needs—even as she notes that healing does not come for other fervent parents.

Looking back on her childhood, Lee Snyder sees an important marker in her quest to understand her place in the "God-scheme of things": God responded to her desperate prayers by returning her prized New Testament. Meanwhile a comparably important marker for my boyhood self, and one which drew me into lifelong questioning of how God does—or doesn’t—work, turned out to be the prayers not answered when my prized pen went missing.

I see Noël King’s story as bridging the prior articles and those that follow. In her parable, our mundane world ends. Though she doesn’t say how this happens, at least for me the implied Worker behind the event is God. But then when the new world comes, old and new get movingly mixed together down in smelly ordinary reality.

And this moves us into the rest of the articles, which are mostly located in the ordinary yet hint at more. J. Denny Weaver tells us of cross-cultural lessons revolving around chalk. Deborah Good tells of her disappointment with humanity. Renee Gehman reports on building a life both in Vietnam and after. Mark Wenger ponders when to pull the plug on beloved computers and go back outside into the tangible world.

None of these writings focus on God. Yet all these authors I suspect are looking in the issues and lives they write of for the Worker behind their own activities, decisions, hopes, or disappointments.

In the last two articles, God remains mostly implicit. Yet even amid the stench of abuse, Jonathan Beachy hopes for Advent. And Daniel Hertzler’s choice of books to review reminds us that Christmas is a key time to ask how God works in the world.

Finally the poets, in their various down-to-earth ways, speak of hands and work and healing down here. In rarely naming yet still hinting at God, they remind us that so often glimpsing how God works has to do with when and how and whether we look. —Michael A. King