Notes and Rumination on the Complications of Faith

This is one I wrote in May. As you'll see, I had been thinking about faith for a while, longer in fact than what I indicate below. I still don't feel I have a handle on it, but I think that's part of the point, part of what it means to believe God and to trust Him with things that cannot be seen:

I really ought to write something long and sustained about faith. I've been thinking about it for just under a year now. I should be accumulating quotation wherever I can find them, other peoples' words that give me a hint of what it means. Last week a guy was talking about his experience during the tornado. He said he thought he had plenty of faith before it happened, and I don't remember where he went from there because I was instantly distracted. I turned to my father, who was sitting beside me, and asked, “Do people really think that, that they have plenty of faith?” I asked because I know for a fact that I have very little.

Kierkegaard, when he isn't talking about the leap of faith, not that I really know what he means by the phrase, Kierkegaard says that faith is not the same as resignation. He says that resignation has to come first, but not to mistake it for faith. Faith is always hopeful, expectant, never disappointed, exists apart from what comes. That's what I understand from a part of Fear and Trembling, anyway, a book I freely admit I may not understand.

Philip Yancey, in his wonderful book, Disappointment with God, says that faith believes God, even when nothing in your circumstances indicates His presence, even when you have no proof that He cares, even when it seems as though He has become your enemy. Faith always believes.

In another of Yancey's books he quotes Frederick Buechner. I love this one. It's long:

If you tell me Christian commitment is a kind of thing that has happened to you once and for all like some kind of spiritual plastic surgery, I say go to, go to, you're either pulling the wool over your own eyes or trying to pull it over mine. Every morning you should wake up in your bed and ask yourself: 'Can I believe it all again today?' No, better still, don't ask it till after you've read The New York Times, till after you've studied that daily record of the world's brokenness and corruption, which should always stand side by side with your Bible. Then ask yourself if you can believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ again for that particular day. If your answer's always Yes, then you probably don't know what believing means. At least five times out of ten the answer should be No because the No is as important as the Yes, maybe more so. The No is what proves you're human in case you should ever doubt it. And then if some morning the answer happens to be really Yes, it should be a Yes that's choked with confession and tears and...great laughter. (From The Return of Ansel Gibbs, Quoted in Soul Survivor)

It would never have occurred to me to pose the question in just that way, which is exactly why I like reading Yancey, Buechner, MacDonald, Kierkegaard, Dillard and others. I don't actually wake up in the morning and ask myself that question. Usually it's all I can do to remember to say good morning, and acknowledge that half the purpose in my getting up is to say hello to Him. (I don't read the newspaper either.) I wonder how my morning might go differently if I did.