I Set Before Thee...

See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil;  Deut. 30:15

Surprise number one from this journal review venture:  dread.  It's such a pretty little journal, but I find sometimes I don't want to touch it. 
I didn't expect it to churn up things I still needed to forgive...things to forgive myself.  I didn't expect it to be filled with a wisdom and a grace I thought I only "achieved" later in life.  If I had that much "access" to Thee back then, why did I nevertheless flounder, as I did?  Now-me has been attributing floundering and lapses of faith to the fact that I was lower on the learning curve about Your love.  Now I've having to face a stark truth:  all my faith is of Thee, it is in Thy hands whether I handle hardship with faith and dignity.  Of myself, I can do nothing.  I've never embraced this truth as fully as I'm finding You press me into it now. 

Practically speaking, I read this: if prone to self-criticism over perceived failures, Kristen Neff, a life-development specialist at the University of Texas, suggests the following:
"Imagine you are an empathetic friend and think, What would this person write to me about this situation?  What would she say about what I'm going through...We've found that most people have a much easier time being self-compassionate if they pretend to be someone else."  Reader's Digest, Feb 2012, p. 125.

Time to open the dread book anyway...and get out the hand puppets.

April 19, 2003
Great analogy from The Case for Faith by Lee Strobel.

[A man] reaches in his pocket and draws out his hand.  "Okay, I"m holding something.  Do you know what it is?"
I venture a guess: "A coin."
"But you don't know for sure," he said.  "That's your opinion.  Our faith is not our opinion.  Let me tell you that I've got a quarter in my hand.  Do you believe that?"
"Sure," I said.
"I'm telling you it's true, but you haven't seen it.  That's faith.  Hebrews says faith is the evidence of things not seen."
Anderson [the man] smiled.  "Watch as I completely destroy your faith."  With that, he opened his hand to reveal a quarter.  "Now it's no longer faith, it's knowledge." (p.238)

I wonder what faith will be like in heaven?  Won't we see the quarter?  Is faith only a component of this life--and hope, I suppose.  I Corinthians 13 speaks of the great three:  faith, hope and charity.  One thing I know from the passage:  of the three that remain--faith, hope and love--the greatest is love.  Love is greater than faith.  That would knock some of the wind of the glassy-eyed, ever smiling, faith shield-shaking types out there.

As I look back over this and consider my reflections on opinion, faith, hope and knowledge, I review the Biblical text that I mentioned.  Now, this verse jumps out at me:  Charity never faileth: but whether [there be] prophecies, they shall fail; whether [there be] tongues, they shall cease; whether [there be] knowledge, it shall vanish away.  I Cr. 13:8 
When I considered it in my journal, I didn't hit me that not only prophecies and tongues (faith and hope and exhortation in my understanding) will cease and fail; but knowledge, too, will vanish away. 

It's not that the quarter will become visible...the quarter will vanish.  I am humbled to realize how limited even yet is my comprehension of the reality of that Heavenly City. 
But I can also see how the evaporation of knowledge might be a gift of heaven, too.

I think of my last little chuckle about faith-healing in this entry. 
It reminds me that the litany of self-absorbed, faulty communities that have strangely oppressed my worship over the years--this litany didn't start with that place that hyper-focused on usefulness above value as I found in reviewing this journal.  It actually reaches much further back in my life.  I'm remembering a previous group of which I was an enthusiastic member for a season.  I was trapped in the teachings of a prosperity ministry. 

My perceptions may have been skewed, but my own progression into membership began with a delightful honeymoon era in which many promises were whispered to me in that marriage bed:  if I but had the faith, I could become healthy, wealthy, influential, a powerhouse of faith, made evident by the fact that my life represented God's best desires for me:  desires made real through the accumulation of all this world had to offer of luxury and easy living. 

I studied faith to show myself approved; I waited to show myself worthy.

But all my streams dried up, and this new "spouse" for all his sweet whisperings now appeared impossible to satisfy.  Finally, when my infant son was lying in the ER extremely ill with a fever so high the medical staff could not stop his seizures and only a respirator kept him breathing--when the nurse came to me with the news that he likely would never breathe on his own again, preparing me for that moment when I would have to make a pull-the-plug decision--at that moment I became blindly furious with my God.

"I've done everything you asked of me.  If there was some way my faith wasn't as good as the faith of all these you're extravagantly blessing with trouble-free lives (I thought here of the people who were representative leaders of this faith movement) then why haven't you told me what is wrong with my faith?  Why don't I rate that same secret knowledge of how to work a faith that satisfies your demands?  Am I really missing the point so much that I will lose my son over it?!?  How can you be so cruel!!"  I was angrier than I'd ever been.

Within minutes, a precious colleague--a devout and humble friend of God--came to sit with me in my vigil.  I was beyond hiding anguish behind a gloss of competent religiosity. I wept as I told him how much I realized my God disapproved of me and how much I despaired of this--for I'd been taught indirectly that this was the only possible assumption I could make in the face of such devastating loss.  If the hardship were financial, then throwing a little more money at "leadership" would surely garner blessings, but this...well, this went beyond all that.

And my friend responded with talk of Job. 

No one had mentioned Job to me in years. 

In fact, I joke now that the Bible used by this faith-focus group where I resided for that season, it was a Bible about 14 verses long, functionally speaking.  But he spoke of Job, and I felt like thunder clapped in my soul.  I began to be healed.  Scales began to drop from my eyes that day as I began to remember things I already knew but had consciously put aside in order to embrace this paradigm that looked so broad and rich and was actually terribly confining and full of pride and self-absorption. 

Did I really believe God couldn't bless a person through their suffering?

Did I really believe poverty equaled a bad witness?

Did I really believe God changed his mind and now only promoted temporal blessings for His people?

Did God really intend to punish my weak faith by taking my son away from me?

Apparently not...