Awakening

This post logs a long journal entry.  I'll refrain from much commentary other than to say it references my oldest son's attendance at a grace-focused teen retreat called Awakening.  It is the teen version of The Great Banquet, which is similar to Emmaus, Cursillo, etc. if you are familiar with these.  I got his permission to share my reflections on his wonderful weekend!

June 27, 2004
We took M. to his Awakening this weekend, and it was everything we'd hoped it would be for him.  I am proud and happy for him, and I am awed to be raising Godly children.  The weekend was just as wonderful for us, too.  We served the Saturday night dinner and attended the evening surprise.  I saw a boy there I knew.  He was serving as an assistant table leader.  He was a kid who had previously been in so much trouble at our school that he was basically told, "find a new school or be expelled."  His parents enrolled him in a Christian school, and I hadn't seen him in all the time since.  Amazing how God works.  I'd felt the unction to pray for this kid a few times over the last year, but didn't sense why specifically.  M. told me more about him.  This boy's "talk" to the group was one of the most powerful of all the talks give.  He talked about what he went through--powerful enough it brought tears to M.'s eyes to remember it.  What a reminder that we serve a God who is in the business of changing lives!  You hear people talk about how God has changed them, but I guess eventually you get old enough to see both sides of that "change" in a particular individual, and it is stunning.  This boy hugged me at one point and whispered in my ear, "I bet you never expected to see me here!"  And he was right.  He was also thrilled to be able to show himself to me, and to see me receive the hug with open arms.

M. had the chance to speak before the families about how the weekend affected him.  He commented that he started the weekend listing three areas in which he wanted God's guidance:  study, prayer, and service.  Then he said amazingly the first three "talks" were on these very things...and in that order.  Boom, boom, boom.  His voice shook a bit as he shared the wonder of that God-coincidence, the sense of divine leading and confirmation He felt from it.  It gave him chills.  Sort of does me, too!

I'm beginning a faith study and found I had my own God-coincidence.  I went to look up the word faith in the concordance, but found my eyes quickly land on the word discouragement instead.  Discouragement as a topic led me to look at reference verses in Hebrews 11, which is, of course, the "pinnacle" chapter on faith--clever irony there, eh, God?  God was feeding me a related word I hadn't thought to consider.  Then, as I read about discouragement I realized I did indeed need to consider it before I started reviewing faith, for as my Bible's side note in Hebrews 11 states:  "Faith is the foundation for the Christian life and the means by which all unseen things are tested."  Discouragement must be dealt with before such testing of the unseen can produce anything eternally good!

So...here are some thoughts on faith now that I am pairing it with a study on discouragement:

First thought, Sarah gets mentioned in the "faith hall of fame" as it is called there in Hebrews.  I've been thinking about her a lot lately.  I sat at the Table of Sarah--a table chosen for me by faithful saints--when I went to my own Emmaus walk.  I had to state my table assignment when I served dinner at M.'s retreat, and that's what brought my own "assignment" to mind.  Is my God-coincidence saying that I too will "birth" a ministry later in life? 
Second, Jesus is the author and finisher of our faith, and apart from Him, we can do nothing, so my question is: to what degree is my faithfulness dependent on Him?  Sounds like totally dependent--yet I retain the power to turn away, and there's the fact that Jesus told the woman who bathed His feet in her tears that her faith saved her.  Just what was her faith apart from whatever He made it?  And was it a faith in what He was about to do because he'd not faced the cross yet?  I know I have the power to turn away from the "heavenly hope" of Hebrews 12, but to what degree am I responsible for turning toward it?  His prevenient grace draws me--that is a huge part of the message of all these retreats that grew out of the Cursillo.  If Jesus is author and finisher of my faith, and if I can't do anything without Him, then what exactly is my part in this faith thing?  

After some study on this, I have come to the following conclusion.  God led me to read on both discouragement and faith in Hebrews 11 and 12 to bring me to this image:
Faith is like a beautiful plant--with each of us being empowered to tend such faith-flowers in a garden God loves to stroll, where He takes pleasure and remembers the beautiful days of Eden.  But a powerful weed attempts to choke out this faith plant, and that weed is bitterness--it chokes out the growth of faith and spreads itself across the ground.  Discouragement seeps into the soil from that bitter root.  We may not always have control of the circumstances that fertilize our live, but we can control how we react as garden-tenders.  We can choose whether to take that weed seriously enough to hoe it out and burn it, or we can fool ourselves into minimizing its effect on the garden and just let it grow.  Sarah came around from derisive laughing when God told her she'd bear a child to having the faith to indeed bear Isaac.  The weed, even somewhat grown, can be pulled! 

I shall  keep these verses in my heart.  Circumstances of late have given plenty of opportunity for bitterness to grow and faith to wilt, but I can choose to tend faith and let bitterness wilt instead.  For now, I understand this much:  He starts a faith-thing; I make a faith vs. discouragement choice about it; and then He finishes based on the outcomes of my choice.  Could that be right?  Could that define our "part" in the thing?

Habakkuk 3 speaks to me here.

When I wrote this, I didn't quote the Habakkuk reference.  Here it is, and it is beautifully apropos for the idea of making the choice of faith in the enigmatic middle of a start to finish faith journey engineered by the hand of God:
 Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither [shall] fruit [be] in the vines; the labour of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and [there shall be] no herd in the stalls:  Yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation. The LORD God [is] my strength, and he will make my feet like hinds' [feet], and he will make me to walk upon mine high places. (vs. 17-19)