Crux

Sometimes you can spend all day reading dense theological tomes about open theism, theological determinism, theodicy, soteriology, healing and what have you, and then a story just nutshells it for you, just like that. (I'd like to reduce the masculine pronouns, but I loved this book too much to mess with it.)
"There's an old Jewish story that says in the beginning God was everywhere and everything, a totality. But to make creation, God had to remove Himself from some part of the universe, so something besides Himself could exist. So He breathed in, and in the places where God withdrew, there creation exists."
"So God just leaves?"
"No. He watches. He rejoices. He weeps. He observes the moral drama of human life and gives meaning to it by caring passionately about us, and remembering. Matthew ten, verse twenty-nine: Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it. 
But the sparrow still falls." 
Mary Doria Russell ~ The Sparrow