When I was younger, I thought I had to defend God.
I assumed life’s most difficult questions —why bad things happen to good people, where the universe came from, etc.— all had learnable answers which would let God off the hook. I thought I should know these answers inside and out so, when people questioned God’s goodness or power or existence, I could always respond with a perfectly logical argument. We call this practice of using logic and argument to defend Christian belief (and by extension God) “apologetics,” and while the popularity of apologetics reached its zenith in the mid-20th Century, there are still many who hold to this style of analysis today. There’s a problem though:

If we think God is so weak as to need our defense,
we’re probably wrong about God.

If God is as good and powerful and loving and present as we really belief,
defending God would be a needless exercise.

And when setting out to prove the existence and nature of God,
proving God’s existence is easy (as something had to create this whole universe),
but proving God is good, God is love, God is triune, and all the rest?
Well, those topics require leaps of faith.

So why defend God at all?
Well, honestly, maybe we shouldn’t.

I tried this out once recently. I was talking to a bar patron, and when I explained my day job as a chaplain, he stated firmly, “I don’t want to talk about God! I hate God!” I responded with, “That’s okay. I’m not here to defend God.” The man was a little confused at first, but then we wound up having a good conversation about what he was going through. Now, we didn’t end in prayer or anything like that, but he felt relief; someone had listened to him instead of cramming a bunch of arguments about God down his throat.

God doesn’t need our defense,
and maybe if we spent less energy on defending God,
we might get better at showing people God’s love
so that others might experience God for themselves.