What would Jesus do on a Saturday night?
The problem with faith is that you don’t know if it worked until it’s too late.
Of course, that creates a paradox, since if you knew it was going to work, would it be faith? Probably 8 out of 10 discussions about faith end up referring to a chair… I suspect it is because of the plentiful nature of chairs, except of course in desert wastelands, as well as movies that are set to take place in ancient China. So, to carry on the tradition, I’ll talk about a chair.
Yesterday, while having one of the strangest, and also most productive, band practices I have ever engaged in, a friend came down to hear us play and took a seat in a teal plastic chair. It held him up well for about ten seconds. Shortly thereafter it collapsed, and he did the “quick stand up and act cool” look that can only exist in moments of extreme embarrassment. Apparently this chair has collapsed dozens of times under various payloads, and yet Todd never makes a point to throw it out. Probably for this reason.
When this friend took a seat, he knew that it could hold his weight… That is the nature of faith, as is often described in various sermon illustrations. People feel ok sitting in a chair because they have faith that the chair will hold them. They don’t check the chair for structural integrity, or lice. They just sit down. However, those sermons typically fail to mention that there will be times when the chair falls down, because where we wanted to sit really just wasn’t all that great in the first place. It really wasn’t as sturdy as it looked, and the story didn’t end the way we thought it would.
But the rough thing is that we are forced to have faith in a variety of contexts, because if we don’t our lives will be miserable. We would all have rotten knees from standing all day, although the calculus skills necessary to determine the limits of a structure would be much more finely tuned.
In life, too, having faith often isn’t necessary, but frankly just makes life simpler. I recently have had a major upset in my life that was completely unexpected, and it really forced me to trust that God would mend the situation. No, it’s not as quick as I would like it to be, but rarely anything is. But the simple fact is that a relationship is being mended that I was afraid I had lost forever. My options were limited; I could either talk a lot and make things far worse than they were, or I could wait and trust that God would do the legwork.
Guess what. He did. It rarely comes in the forms that we expect it to, and sometimes the chair will fall right out from under us, but more often than not, God is right there to pick us back up and get us moving again. Sometimes he fixes the chair we wanted to sit in, and sometimes he’ll just get us a new one. Sometimes God doesn’t even use extended metaphors, and instead He just says, “Shut up your face and listen.” You never really know how the story is going to end, but what book or movie is better when you know the ending? Even if it ends where you thought it would, so often it gets there in a totally different way than you expected, and that’s what is so exciting about Faith in the first place.
Generally speaking, discussions of faith abound in clichés and catch-phrases. It is essentially poeticized to the point of being useless in the real situations in life where we need to understand faith the most. Further complicating the situation is that typically we believe that faith is something we are “just supposed to have.” There is no apparent explanation as to where it comes from. I don’t have anything deep or philosophical to help out in this area, but I will say this: When I have earnestly asked God to provide me with faith, He has obliged. I’m not entirely sure how it works, but it does.
So, when the crap hits the fan, ask for faith that God will work things out the way they need to be. It might take some work on your part; you cannot have faith without investing yourself into it, else it is just a pretty belief that you don’t care to try.
Ask for faith, and you’ll probably get just enough of it to leap.
Keep it real, folks.
Peter
“what do you do when your foundation falls apart? I don’t know, they don’t teach you that in school…”
that’s taken from the movie SLC Punk, a punk-rock rulebook for disenfranchised suburbanites who went to Warped Tour and got upset about being priviledged. like i was in highschool. the important thing is that it picks some fights with some battle-hardened questions. like that one. what do you do? i can tell you about the Spanish Armada, long division, and verb tenses, but when friends die, or move out of the country, or parents cut you off, you lose your job, or the lady wants to see other people, does anyone really know what to do? no. you can have ideas and scenarios and plans for recovery or retribution or revenge, but what do they do? those are like a paper topics, a few lines describing what you think is going to happen in the 25 page monstrosity that defines the current situation or problem.
what do you do? you have faith. you lose it. you kick it, poke it, prod it, play mariokart with it. you abuse it, use it, doubt it, and romanticize about it. but in the end, like a really good friend, it’s still there. even if you think you don’t have it, that you’ve lost it. it’s just where you left it.
i use this arguement with atheists. as they claim, they don’t believe in God. I do believe in a God. But i doubt Him and i struggle with Him and sometimes im just not sure what He wants or what He has planned. and just because i question Him and question my faith proves to me that He and it, respectively, are there. Atheists are human, too. They doubt, they question, they challenge, and sometimes just aren’t really sure about their beliefs just like everyone else. and i really think it is that doubt and uncertainty is what proves that He really is there, for everyone.
Faith. I think it’s pretty neat and no matter what anyone says, they have it. It just might be a little different than how you left it. and that’s ok.
yeah man, good points all around.
It would be kind of awesome if they had a class on breaking-up in high school. I guess the homework would be really weird though… I’m not entirely sure how they would pull that off.
Great reads fellas. I can’t remember whose Halo name is GWAR, so come up to me so I can thank you for it.
The day stuff goes down, challenges us to offer a response. How are we going to respond? Press forward? Move back? Stay in numbness. Today was that day for me. More later… It deserves an article.
looking forward to reading it Rev.
GWAR is the alias of I, Jonathan Roberts.