And here we thought God was too busy trying to answer the prayers of Hurricane Katrina victims, California fire victims and of Dancing With The Stars Contestants who are praying for their competitors to fall flat on their faces.
Just trying to save the souls of the men and woman running for President is a tough enough job for one overworked deity.
But he is now busy with something else: administering Oral Roberts University:
Richard Roberts told students at Oral Roberts University that he did not want to resign as president of the scandal-plagued evangelical school, but that he did so because God insisted.
God told him on Thanksgiving that he should resign the next day, Roberts told students in the university’s chapel on Wednesday.
That must have been a tough day for God to tell him, since that’s the day when God has all those requests from people making Thanksgiving dinner for God to make their relatives go home already.
“Every ounce of my flesh said ‘no'” to the idea, Roberts said, but he prayed over the decision with his wife and his father, Oral Roberts, and decided to step down.
Roberts said he wanted to “strike out” against the people who were persecuting him, and considered countersuing, but “the Lord said, ‘don’t do that,'” he said.
Wait a minute: has the Lord passed his bar exam? He could be getting lousy legal advice.
After submitting his resignation, he said, for “first time in 60 days peace came into my heart.”
Roberts spoke for only a few minutes and was applauded and cheered by students. He wiped away tears with a white handkerchief and his hands.
“This has nearly destroyed my family, and it’s nearly destroyed ORU,” Roberts said.
A lawsuit accuses Roberts of lavish spending at a time when the university faced more than $50 million in debt, including taking shopping sprees, buying a stable of horses and paying for a daughter to travel to the Bahamas aboard the university jet.
Note that this isn’t the first time that God has given him advice in this case.
Roberts has previously said that God told him to deny the allegations. The week the lawsuit was filed, Richard Roberts said that God told him: “We live in a litigious society. Anyone can get mad and file a lawsuit against another person whether they have a legitimate case or not. This lawsuit … is about intimidation, blackmail and extortion.”
On Wednesday, Roberts said God told him he would “do something supernatural for the university” if he stepped down from the job he held at the 5,700-student school since 1993.
We can’t image what that’d be. Tell us in comments.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.