I was listening to, “The Remnant” podcast recently, in which Jonah Goldberg and David Brooks made a fascinating observation: When people are successful, they love to take all the credit, but when they fail, they love to blame someone else.

Take for example, when you get a promotion or a great new job: You got it because you are super talented, worked hard, and pulled yourself up by the bootstraps. But when you get laid off… it’s because Joe Biden and the Democrats have ruined the economy.

This of course, is a story as old as time. And it manifests itself in a variety of ways throughout the history of the world. The Romans blamed the Christians for the decline of their empire. Hitler blamed the Jews for the decline of Germany. Republicans blame the Democrats, and the Democrats blame the Republicans. Children blame their parents for why they are so messed up, and Boomers blame Millennials for why their country is no longer great.

And the funny thing is, we often play this blame game without much in the way of any evidence. At best we have a few anecdotal type stories that we use to shame “the other,” and to support our preferred narratives.

Just this morning, for example, I noted on Facebook how gas prices had fallen below $3 a gallon near where I live. And immediately, as if by natural reflex, without any supporting evidence, over half a dozen of my family and friends started conspiring, that the reason for this was that old senile president Joe Biden was causing gas prices to fall, because we are heading into the 2024 election, and he has to rig the economy in his favor.

And I only point this out, not to shame my family or friends, but to show how people are already preemptively preparing a narrative, to explain why Donald Trump might lose the 2024 presidential election. They could never admit, for example, that Trump might just be a politician the majority of Americans don’t like. Rather, it must be because Joe Biden managed to artificially lower gas prices so as to cause the masses to believe the economy is doing better than it seems. But of course, if Donald Trump manages to win the 2024 election, it’ll be because they believed they backed a superior candidate that everyone else liked too. And all stories about gas prices and elections being rigged against them, will simply be forgotten.

So the question then is, why do people behave this way? Why do people love to glory in their successes, but blame others on why their life sucks? And why do they so quickly resort to strange conspiracy theories to explain such notions?

I think we do these things because it gives us a sense of control we have over our lives. When everything goes according to plan, we feel like a wise chess grandmaster, aggressively pushing pawns and sacrificing queens as we skillfully plot our path to victory. But when we lose, we get angry and defensive, and feel someone is somehow cheating us out of something that rightfully belongs to us. Therefore we lose, not because of something we did or did not do, but because there’s a smoke filled room in which people are conspiring against us.

And we tell ourselves such stories, I believe, because it ultimately comforts us. It gives us a sense of control over our lives, because we feel deep down inside that if it were not for this “other” person or group of people, then our lives would be unfolding before us as planned.

For example, if you were to read the founding charter documents of Hamas, as I recently did a few weeks ago, they spend a lot of time spelling out that the only reason they don’t control Palestine presently, is because world Jewry has engaged in a 150 year old plot to take over the world through banks and the media. But Hamas ultimately believes they’ll overcome the Jews as a result of their struggles against them, because Allah will ultimately bless their efforts to kill Jews wherever they may hide.

Such shows how nutty Hamas leaders are in their thinking. They currently are failing because of the global conspiracy of Jews, but one day they’ll succeed because Allah has got their back. So, which is it?

I don’t claim to be a fundamentalist Islamic terrorist theologian. So I’ll leave such questions regarding Divine providence up to them to figure out. But I only bring them up, because fundamentally most of us naturally think the same way. The natural gut reaction of our inner theologian isn’t much different than theirs. Our theology just involves different actors, but like a good Hallmark movie, involves the same plot over and over again.

Maybe, just maybe we all need to learn to write a different story line? But that story line is one that scares us to death to tell, which is why we don’t tell it. Instead we prefer to tell the story in which we get to play the blame game.

The truth is, life is scary. It’s full of random events that happen, often unexpectedly, with little that we can do to control the outcome of such events.

We can work hard, save, invest, and play by all the rules, only to unexpectedly lose our job when there’s an economic downturn.

We can exercise, eat right, get a good nights sleep, yet still receive an unexpected cancer diagnosis in the prime of our life.

We can lovingly wine and dine a romantic partner, get married, and pour our entire life into that person, only to watch them cheat on you anyway.

When such things happen, when life throws is an unexpected curve ball, it’s so easy to seek an explanation that allows us to blame someone else, and to find comfort in those explanations.

But such is the easy way out.

For it’s harder to admit we live in a world in which we aren’t God and that a lot of things are going to happen that are far outside our ability to understand and control.

It’s far harder to give yourself over to that reality, and to simply fling yourself into the hands of God, and trust that whatever happens in your life, both good and bad, that things are ultimately in the hands of God, and that you are willing to trust Him no matter what the outcome of your circumstances and actions might be.

We ultimately engage in constructing narratives that blame others for when things don’t go our way, because we ultimately don’t want to let go of the sense of control we feel we have, and are ultimately failing to trust God with our lives.

And in the process, we instinctively blame Joe Biden, the Jews, immigrants, or a lot of other people that we are secretly suspicious of as being somehow engaged in a plot against us.

And that’s not to say there aren’t powerful people in this world plotting against others. There certainly are such people.

But our instincts shouldn’t be to look for a boogeyman to blame, but ultimately, to throw our lives into the hands of the God who we can trust.