I Don't Believe in Divine Intervention

We can learn and practice ways to choose our experiences based on our divinity and the laws of Intention, Expectation, and Attraction.

Noelle Sterne

In the last four days, two clients in my dissertation-coaching business declared passionately to me, “I’ll finish my dissertation—with Divine Intervention!” I chafed at this. Glad they used the word “Divine,” nevertheless I hastened to correct them (diplomatically) about “Intervention.”

Admittedly, “Divine Intervention” is one of those theological clichés that’s supposed to show your faith. But it goes against everything I—and many, many others—believe and teach. Divine Intervention presupposes that the Divine Entity sits up there, somewhere. If we pray, beseech, bargain, promise to be good often and sincerely enough, He/She/It/They will turn and wave the wand in our direction. And according to Their whim, they’ll dispense favors, gifts, healings, meetings, money, love, lawsuit settlements.

Divine hogwash! The notion is based on the concept, too often accepted, that we are frail, fallen, guilty, and subject to a mysterious Divine Caprice and Judgment about our worthiness to drop into our lives whatever it is we’re so desperately seeking.

I’m glad to tell you that it does not work this way.

Instead, think of the principle as Divine Intention. Wayne Dyer’s by-now well-known book, The Power of Intention is subtitled Co-Creating Your World Your Way. What does this mean? That Divine outcomes are in our power, not anyone or Anything else’s.

Similarly, a Unity Daily Word (September 7, 2010) tells us this:

When I live my life from a point of intention, I consciously create my experiences. If I expect a joyful encounter, I receive a joyful encounter. If I see my day going smoothly, I create such a day. By setting my intention, I am determining what my life will look like each day . . . . [I] trust that God knows what is my highest good.

As we recognize our own Divinity (remember, we’re all Ph.D.s—Phenomena of Divinity), we create, fashion, mold, shape, call forth our life experiences. We don’t have to submit to what we’ve been conditioned to think of as “God’s Will.” Usually, this notion keeps us powerless before some faceless, to-be-feared, and impulsive dispensing Power that rains both good and evil on us and must constantly be supplicated and bargained with (and sacrificed to with farm animals). Rather, we can learn and practice ways to choose our experiences based on our divinity and the laws of Intention, Expectation, and Attraction.