July
22nd, in our room, Hudson’s house, night
Wow. I
really don’t know what to say. We did a bunch of things after I last wrote,
playing with more kids, seeing stuff, but that’s not important. I have learned
how to run. Or, walk, rather, as I’m too little to run. I’ll start
with something my brother said. We started talking about some of our deeper questions of Christianity, and the question of scripture and its application came up.
“How do I know that verse was meant for me, and not for the Israelites in their specific time and place? Then, why does it matter? Is scripture inherent anyways? Does the God who supposedly spoke it really speak it? Does he even really love me? …Does he even really exist? Does life have a purpose anyways?
…and now I’ve put myself alone on this island, questioning the existence of God and the nature of the universe.”
He said that tonight as an example of how he’s gone about questioning our faith in the past. Questioning and testing your beliefs is a vital part of making your faith your own, but...where does it lead? I do know this: if you pursue doubt for the sake of doubt, you find darkness. And that darkness has plagued me since I took my first steps toward Christ.
I call it the Catacombs, after the Greek myth of the Minotaur. King
Minos of Crete had these catacombs he would push people into – an immense maze, impossible to comprehend
and plunged in darkness. The maze was special – it always moved you towards its
center. In the center was the Minotaur – death. The questions are the
Catacombs. The first one “opens a door to a dark room” as Andy put it, and the
rest, instead of showing you the way out, plunge you ever deeper into the
darkness, into the maze where at the center is the complete rejection of God
and salvation – the Minotaur, and death.
These questions, the Catacombs, have a covert purpose: control. All my
life I’ve tried to understand with my mind – the whys, the hows, etc. I read and watched all the
theories, the explanations, all telling me the reasons I should or should not
believe what I believe. And all of it, all the feeble grasps at understanding,
are my attempts to control – to define, shorten, limit, package, and shelve
away anything that ironically cannot be defined or limited. We’re attempting to
fetter the unfetterable – God. What we don’t realize is what actually happens –
in the reaching up to chain that which is above us, our strength fails. The
chains fall back on us. We deceive ourselves into thinking that we have been
freed by defining this element of spirituality, caging ourselves in the
process. Really, we define ourselves by that control. It’s the core component
of who we are. But I’ve got news for you – the Christian life is the most out
of control and freefalling life there is. And yeah, that still scares the crap
out of me, as it should you – if by nature we are controlling beings, then the
idea of being out of control is contrary to our very self. But that is the
secret – to Deny Self, in the words of John Piper. And the secret to that? Let
go. - some people call it Faith. When I came to that realization, I said
something out loud -
“I’m
coming to see that faith is as big a part of my Faith as anything else is.”
Say it
out loud a few times and you’ll get the irony.
All my
life I have heard people use the word “faith”. Everyone has. It’s always been
some…THING vaguely related to God and stuff, something that I really couldn’t
put in concrete terms. But on the trip we started talking about something using
that same word, “faith”, but it was something so different that I didn’t
connect it to what I had known all my life. The way we were talking it and
living it was much more to do about God providing somewhere to sleep, something
to eat in a country where people go for days without eating, and water to drink
when we had nothing resembling a purifier. That the next thing you put in your
mouth wouldn’t bring a parasite along with it. That the darkness of the voodoo
drums in the mountains were less than the light that protected us. It was so
immediate, so simple, so uncomplicatedly real, that tonight I made that
ridiculous statement.
And that was the key –
I stopped thinking, stopped doubting, and stopped bloody using my stupid head,
and just…trusted. Trusted God in the fact that we would always have something
to eat, somewhere to sleep. And in the letting go of those concerns, instead of
losing everything, I found it all. Losing control, that thing so desired and
worked towards, actually put me in complete peace.
It’s precisely like love –
when you love someone, what do you do? Or perhaps, what don’t you do? You’d
never ask “So do I really love her?”, “Why do I keep doing all these nice
things anyways?”, or even “Isn’t this just a bunch of chemicals all mixed up
weird?” No. You just…love. Thoughtless, uninvited, unquestioned, selfless love.
So when you try to control, to make perfect sense of things, you
think, and stop trusting, stop loving, and become chained again. I’m beginning
to see a small piece of this enormous sadness. God must feel like this when he
sees his creation shackled in such a way. I have this image in my mind, and
it’s more of a feeling than a picture, so I’ll do my best. The image is this – a human, naked and free, running through
fields of endless joy, all the while lying in the blissful happiness of God’s
arms. Nothing, no thing can stop this sprint to and from God – the walls, the
pits, and the giants in life are transparent shadows, laughingly passed
through. When we doubt (or fear, or any other sin in this case), we stop
running. We look around us, and instead of passing through them, we push
against the walls, shiver as we peer down into the pits, and quail at the
giants. We then do everything in our power to imagine a creative way to bypass
the obstacles, maybe climb over the wall, build a bridge over the pit, or maybe
single-handedly beat down the giants. All this when we shouldn’t even be
looking at the problems! Our eyes should, and were created to be on God,
powered by a triune battery of faith, hope, and love. Love has been my focus
for a few years now, and I believe I understand a few morsels of it. Faith I
have come to see clearer in these past few days…marked by my “I don’t see how
faith fits in with love” remark the first day I was here. Hope, I still do not
understand, but I have faith (hah) God will reveal its place to me.
“Hope
without Faith is powerless, and faith without hope is purposeless.”
-
Andy, just after writing this when I asked him about hope. I had to think about
it for awhile.
Here’s
my weak attempt at working Faith, Hope, and Love together. You
must have the faith to let go, falling into the unsurpassed love of the Father
where you cannot help but love back, with a well-rooted and secure hope that
keeps you in giddy anticipation of what comes next, like a kid at
Christmas.
The
morning after I wrote all this, I had a weird feeling, and tried to identify
it. It was precisely like I had a huge crush on some girl, a girl I’d
definitely be seeing soon. You know what I mean - that weird, bubbly feeling
where you almost vibrate with anticipation. Only then I realized that it wasn’t
over any girl, it was over God. In realizing all that was written above, I
found myself in direct, relational contact with God, beginning to fulfill the
purpose of my humanity. I was (and am)…in the beginning stages of a loving
relationship with my Creator, which made me…giddy. How hilarious is that?
Author's note, four years later: I consider this piece to be a sort of "Part 1" to what I'm sure will be a lifelong journey with God. I hold Beyond Doubt as "Part 2" to the thoughts begun here.
Author's note, four years later: I consider this piece to be a sort of "Part 1" to what I'm sure will be a lifelong journey with God. I hold Beyond Doubt as "Part 2" to the thoughts begun here.