Struggling Through Faith To Faith

Faith has disparagingly been characterized as a “crutch” for “weak minds.”  And on one real level, that is true: every Christian, for example, in exercising faith, has realized that he or she is a spiritually helpless sinner facing a just, holy and morally perfect God.  Christianity has been called the only religion in which one must first claim personally helplessness in order to join.  If someone wants to trivialize the faith of the Christian as a “crutch,” I cannot help but ultimate affirm the characterization.

But, for “weak minds”?  There I would profoundly disagree.  Faith is not a sign of weakness, but a source of strength, inspiration, and resolve.  Let me provide a non-religious example in the D-Day invasion: imagine being one of the thousands of men who waded ashore to attack Omaha Beach in the face of murderous machine gun fire, mortars, howitzers, and mines.  Whole companies of men in the first waves were simply wiped out.  Men fortunate enough to make it ashore discovered there was absolutely no cover.  And that they could neither retreat nor advance without perishing.  Yet advance they did.

Men screamed and ran without their arms until they were mercifully cut down.  Men tried to walk as their entrails dragged behind them.  Men without legs screamed and screamed and screamed as they flailed in agony.  The surf turned red with blood, and all that could be heard was enemy machine gun fire and screaming and explosions.  And yet somehow they advanced.  Over the bodies of their dead and wounded, the Americans continued to come.

What drove them forward to victory, I would argue, was faith, and faith of the most desperate kind.  Faith that their cause was just and necessary.  Faith that their generals had devised a good plan that could be accomplished if they did the parts assigned to them.  Faith that they would ultimately prevail, rather than fail.  And so somehow, in spite of everything that went wrong for the Americans on Omaha Beach that day (e.g., the troops launched too far offshore in too-deep water; the naval bombardment that hit far too inland to damage the German fortifications; the Sherman tanks that were supposed to be landed to support the assault sank), the American infantrymen somehow forced themselves out of the burrows of sand that they had scratched for themselves and assaulted the German fortifications.  And yet somehow, in spite of so many of their brothers perishing in the attempt, they pushed their way over the Germans and won the day.  And it was faith that drove them forward.

All trivializing aside, faith is never easy.  There are always disasters, always barriers, always obstacles that must somehow be overcome.  It is always so much easier to surrender, to give up, to abandon hope, than it is to cling to what often appears to be the tiniest sliver of hope.  I would argue that – the analogy to a “crutch” for the “weak” aside – it is always more difficult to maintain faith than it is to abandon faith for cynicism, pessimism, and despair.

Furthermore, we all have to exercise faith in our everyday lives, whether theist or atheist.  How do I know my breakfast isn’t poisoned or loaded with e coli?  How do I know my spouse isn’t trying to kill me?  How do I know for certain that my car won’t explode, or that the brakes won’t suddenly fail?  How do I know I won’t get in an accident on the way to work?  And on and on.  We all have to put our doubts aside and choose to believe in something every single waking moment.  The only question becomes which object(s) we choose to trust.  Because at some point every one under the sun has to place faith in someone or something outside of themselves, outside of their own limited abilities, and outside of their own ultimately incredibly finite knowledge.

And faith is ever only as good or beneficial as its object.

But what about those times when “faith” doesn’t seem to work?  What about those times when we pray and pray, and there is no answer or, – even worse yet – when the thing we pray for so diligently does not come to pass.

Many American infantrymen certainly didn’t triumphantly prevail in their faith; thousands died, and their bodies lay in soil hallowed by their blood in row upon row of cross-marked graves at Normandy.  Did the fact that they died mean that their faith was in vain?

Ultimately, no; their side prevailed.  And in that sense, Christians can continue to have that same faith that, regardless of what happens to them, that ultimately the God they cling to will prevail in the cosmic battle against evil and the forces of evil.  And more: that the God who triumphs over evil will triumph over His believers’ evil natures, and ultimately bring them through the end to the perfection of Christlikeness.

But, like the wounded, screaming soldier lying broken and bleeding on the beach, that ultimate reassurance may not always be enough to comfort.  Is there more we can say about the believer’s constant struggle with faith?

I had my own struggle, recently.  And I believe God brought me through it with a lesson.  That lesson has helped me; if you are reading this, perhaps it can help you as well.

I have had three particularly difficult experiences in my life: the first occurred when I was a young Christian in the Army.  I was injured badly, and in spite of all my prayers, everything seemed to take the worst turn for me.  I got out of the Army broken spiritually as well as physically.

For the next ten years, I lived like a pagan.  I never denied that there was a God, but I wondered.  where had He been when I needed Him?  What good had He been?  Did He even care?  Was He even there at all?

But finally, I reached the end of myself.  I came to miss the relationship – yes, relationship – I had had and enjoyed with my God.  I began to study, to read, to answer the question that I had been raised to simply accept as a presupposition.  Was God real?  Was Christianity real?  Did Jesus really rise from the dead, and in so doing ensure that I, too, would ultimately prevail with Christ in my own resurrection from death to eternity with Him?

I can’t share that search here (it would be at least one article all by itself!).  But, finally, I came to a point of studying and reflecting in which I realized that it was all true – that Christ had really come, really died in my place as the prophets said He would, and really risen bodily from the dead.  I remember that moment like it just occurred: I was pacing in my kitchen, too excited by my realization to sit down, when I had an experience that still moves me to this day.

Out of the corner of my eye, or at least the corner of my mind’s eye, I had a flash of a presence that I instinctively knew was Christ.  And just as immediately and instinctively, I knew that Jesus had been there all along, and had never turned away from me; but that I had turned away from Him.  But there He was, arms opened wide, to welcome me back the moment I turned toward Him.  That realization brought forth a torrent of tears like I had never wept before, or since.

But after every “mountaintop experience,” if one lives long enough, and continues to travel far enough, there will always be valleys.

I remember thinking of the story of the Jews during the Exodus: after all the excitement of God bringing His people under Moses out of bondage in Egypt after displaying one mighty sign after another, the people defiled their new faith by worshiping a golden calf when Moses left them for a mere 40 days!  I used to think, “I would NEVER have done that.”  Now I know otherwise.

The second difficult event of my life occurred when my dog died.  He didn’t die easily; his kidneys and liver shut down from cancer, and he could neither eat nor drink without vomiting.  The night before I took him to the vet to be put down, I prayed and cried: “Can’t you heal him, Lord?  It’s such a little thing; it won’t make any difference to anyone but me.  Please, Lord?”

I had to put him down.  And I had to struggle with why God hadn’t healed him.

There’s an inherent tension in faith in God: on the one hand, we are told that God answers our prayers; on the other, we know that God is God, and we are His servants, rather than He ours.  If God jumps through every hoop I ask of Him in prayer, who is God?  And yet He is a God who answers our prayers.

I did not abandon my faith in God as a result of losing my very beloved dog; but I often felt that my prayer life was like an electric circuit with a faulty switch.  What did it really mean to count upon God?

Just over nine years later, I had to struggle with faith again, as my second Rottweiler lay on the verge of death.

He suffered for over three weeks, scarcely able to hold solid food down.  I never did have an answer as to what was going on in his body.

But I once again found myself struggling with the same angst, the same pain, that I had struggled with nine years before: where are you, God?  Why won’t you heal my dog, or at least end his suffering and let him fade away peacefully in his sleep?

Again, there was that attitude that tried to surface, to become bitter toward the God who would not give me this little thing; to turn away from Him and abandon Him the way He had abandoned me and my beloved dog.  Is it easier in such moments to give in and walk away, or is it easier to cling to a faith which can seem to be so dark and so distant?

And then, something came to me: a realization I had never had before.

We had just finished the book of Genesis in my church, with the lion’s share of the sermons devoted to the person of Joseph (Genesis 37-50).  What a story his was: he had been his father’s most beloved son, to the bitter envy of his older brothers.  When one day he told them of a dream that he had had, which clearly meant that his brothers would one day bow down before him, that had become the final straw.  The brothers decided to kill Joseph by throwing him into a pit and abandoning him to die, before ultimately choosing instead to sell him into slavery to a caravan headed for Egypt.  To make a long story short, Joseph went from a slave, to a trusted top slave, to a prisoner, to the second highest ranking man in all of Egypt.  And ultimately, his brothers DID bow down before him, just as he had dreamed so many years before.

And here comes the realization in the form of a question: had Joseph abandoned God, turned away from his faith, renounced God as useless, or simply stopped trusting in Him, would he have become that ruler second only to Pharaoh?

The answer that came immediately to my mind was, “No.  He wouldn’t have.”  Had Joseph turned away from God, he would have been one more bitter slave, one more angry prisoner.

But in spite of all the bitter events that occurred in the life of Joseph, he never turned away from God.  Somehow, even when bad turned to worse, even when he languished for years as a slave, and then a prisoner, he continued to cling to his faith.

And so ultimately, in a moment clearly part of God’s divine timing, God began to shower upon him one blessing after another.

Suddenly, I realized that faith in God meant an abiding decision to trust in His goodness beyond any particular circumstance, and beyond any event even though it last for years.

Jesus taught that if we have faith and do not doubt, we can move mountains (Matthew 21:21).  but what we must realize is that such faith is not the product of any single moment that can be eaten away with doubt the next; rather, such faith is that which takes us not only over the majestic mountain tops, but through the bitter valleys as well.  The kind of faith that truly moves mountains is the faith of Joseph, which is present whether in the rags of prison, or in the robes of Pharaoh.  The faith that moves mountains isn’t in what God will do for me right now; but in who God is from the alpha to the omega.

My dog got better.  He started holding down his food, and he is lying by my side as I type this.  Incredibly, the event of his recovery seemed tied almost precisely to the event of my newfound awareness about the nature of faith, and what it means to trust in God.

One other thing that brought me a moment of profound comfort during this time of anguish and reflection and triumph was when I realized that I would not trade my faith for anything; not for all the gold and silver and precious stones in the world.  And if I wouldn’t trade it for anything, then why would I ever throw it away?

Faith shines most brightly when the darkness is greatest.

Happy Easter!  Maranatha!

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