Have A Little Faith
Have a Little Faith
Some days are difficult than others. Who hasn't experienced this on a rainy Monday morning and caused traffic to come to a halt, and it causes you almost to lose your religion? Metro traffic patterns notwithstanding, I'm sure that you've experienced times that you thought you're going down the right path and out of nowhere you're blindsided by an event, a comment, or personal experience. And it seems as if your name's Murphy since you've experienced his law where everything that could've gone wrong in your life has gone wrong! Sound familiar?
The simple truth is that life requires a little faith and faith compels us to "examine" our lives. It's not so much that life is an algebra equation where we search for the right answer. Rather in times of difficulty and uncertainty, which seems to be constant, life is more about asking the questions.
An “unexamined life,” by contrast, is a one that avoids the issues. Living this type of life makes us think that our faith will crumble if we began to question what we aren't supposed to ask. Behind this "never question" attitude is the misconception that doubt is the opposite of faith and such "doubting" has no place in faith.
There is, however, another way of looking at our faith that suggests that faith not only involves our beliefs but our trust in and allegiance to God. Faith is not a thing we possess, but it is a relationship that maintains us. It is relational and has an organic quality to it helps us to examine our lives so that we can become who God intended.
One way to examine our life is to pay attention to internal stories that we tell ourselves and discern how they shape our identity. These internal stories also apply to churches since they are identity narratives and they speak volumes to the behaviors, values, and assumptions we make. But what happens when the story runs its course? For instance, what happens when a crisis occurs? How do we make sense of our life story when we are in transition, and some unknown story is emerging?
Much of life requires learning new stories during a crisis. For most of us, a crisis usually begins with the realization that things are not going to stay the same. Whether they are personal or societal, transitions happen to us as gradually as the changing of the seasons.
During every crisis, we are invited to have a little faith by examining our lives. To put it another way, we are asked to connect the stories of our lives that includes seeing the connection between our outer lives filled with visible plots, facts, and behavior and the intimate stories of meaning, emotions, feelings, assumptions, and fears that often go unnoticed.
When we are in crisis, it feels like the fog has rolled in from the bay and we cannot see which direction to move. Blinded without a GPS, we struggle to navigate through anxiety, confusion, disillusionment, fear, and frustration. We lose our sense of direction without a map to point out the markers that help move us through the dense fog.
This lost feeling prompts us to ask big questions such as: "What's happening to me? Where is God when I need him? Will this ever end?" Answering these questions is no small task. It's our questions that lead us to other and more complex problems whereby we find a deeper life, richer, more rewarding, more exciting, and most astonishingly, our own intended life—not someone else's.
It is during life's crisis, where we examine our lives and need to edit our stories. These opportunities are God-moments, filled with God's continuing presence and work in our lives. Much like the unfolding of a book, which precedes one chapter at a time, God is ever at work, shaping, editing, retelling, and rounding out our characters so that we may become the person that God created us to be.
On the Journey,
Quincy
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