Things on faith

I appreciate all the prayers on my father's and my family's behalf. And I believe God hears them. What God has in mind is still somewhat grey.

The tumor was malignant and they've found cancer cells active in his lymph nodes. He'll be starting chemotherapy soon -- as soon as he heals from the last surgery. But he has opted to take the treatment. That in itself is a prayer answered and in the way I'd hoped.

Over the last year or so, I've learned a lot about faith. I've learned that in order to learn about faith and in order to grow in faith, I've had to fight with faith -- and fight with God.

I've learned to pray differently. I still pray for God to heal the sick, comfort the hurting, encourage the despairing and to bring about his will and manifest the kingdom of God. But I realize in that last part, the part about "your kingdom come, your will be done," I'm sometimes negating the first part. Not because I think God's will is for people to be sick, hurting, alone or despairing, but rather because in a world full of sickness, hurt, loneliness and despair, God sometimes has to work through that in order to reach us.

In Disappointment with God, Philip Yancey explains this far better than I could. A God who answers prayers like fast food orders and appears in pillars of flame and columns of smoke at the drop of a hat isn't a God who inspires faith and love in his people. More often, they grew to resent him or to take him for granted. But the question "why does God seem so often silent?" That's a question that arises in the lives of most at some point. I'm sure it occurs to anyone who's ever petitioned God for the life of a loved one, only to lose them anyhow. And when the hurt just wraps a cold hand around the heart, squeezing, sometimes the dying breath of faith is, "Where are you, God?"

Why doesn't he reveal himself then? C. S. Lewis struggled, too, when he lost his wife, Joy. The silence of God was heavy and complex, and difficult, too, because so often when he'd not wanted God around, when he wished to be lord of his own life, God was persistent, insistant and omnipresent, at his elbow constantly. So this God who annoys us in our sin and arrogance, where is this same God who will not show himself when we are steeped in pain?

Questions like that get frowned at. I don't understand why, though, when even Christ knew what it was like to sit shadowed in the silence of God and cried out, "Why have you forsaken me?"

Jesus came to be literally God with us. But he also came to become like us, fully human as well -- to experience what it is to be thirsty, tired, sad, happy and if he would know all that, he must also know what it's like to feel forsaken. We really do have a high priest who understands and intercedes.

Philip Yancey has already said that doubt isn't the enemy of faith, fear is. And I think he's right. Questions are only questions. It's when we are too afraid to look for the answers, often because we don't think we'll like what we learn, that our faith begins to fail.

In order for God's kingdom to become manifest in this world through his people, he constrains himself to the context of this world. How will we minister to the hurting if we've never felt pain? How can we love the ones who struggle if we've never struggled? And can any of us say we've never experienced the silence of God?

Sometimes I wonder if the state of our world, our lives, our souls -- I wonder if sometimes it doesn't simply strike God speechless.