Thought for the day:"Hope that is seen is no hope at all," Paul told the Romans. He mentions some of the good things that might come out of difficulties: "Suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope." He lists hope at the end, instead of where I would normally expect it, at the beginning, as the fuel that keeps a person going. No, hope emerges from the struggle, a byproduct of faithfulness.
As for faith, it will always mean believing in what cannot be proven, committing to that of which we can never be sure. A person who lives in faith must proceed on incomplete evidence, trusting in advance what will only make sense in reverse. As Dennis Covington has written, "Mystery is not the absence of meaning, but the presence of more meaning than we can comprehend."
~Philip Yancey, Reaching for the Invisible God
I think this may be the hardest part of faith, the blindness of it all. A blindness that comes not from emptiness, but from a fullness that is too full for me, a brightness that is too bright for these dim eyes to see except in very small doses, reflected and refracted and diffused. "Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain." And sometimes, when I ask God to reveal His plan to me, I realize that maybe I don't really want to know it all now. I don't think I could handle it. I might be like Sarah, and laugh, or like Moses, and claim inadequacy. Sometimes I wish things would make sense in advance. But then we wouldn't need faith. And everyone in their right mind would commit their lives to Christ, because there would be certainty in Him, clear-cut answers and paths and directions. It is so much harder to trust in advance what only makes sense in reverse. But here's the difference: the value is not only in the end, where the path is leading, but also in the process, in who we are becoming along the way. "The testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything." If we knew ahead of time, we might walk a little straighter, stumble less, but would we really be becoming more like Christ? That task is infinitely harder. But infinitely better.
3 comments:
beccaroonie, i was playing stalker sam and trolling your friends' blogs and i saw a link to ben and becky bacheller... do you know them??? they are very good friends of mine! i stayed with the bachellers in brazil when i went there for a short missions trip... we're with the same missions org. ben's older brother was my next-door neighbor in wheaton and we played soccer together. ah, memories.. last i saw ben was before he and becky got married. crazy small world..
No way! That's incredible!!!!! AMAzing!!!! You stayed with the Bachellers in Goias? I didn't know them in Brazil, but Ben came to Houghton and was in my sister Karen's graduating class, so I knew him through her, and through him being the only other Brazilian on campus. (They were seniors when I was a freshman.) I met the whole Bacheller family at their graduation, and have talked to Ben's Wheaton brother (whose name I can't remember, but I do remember that he's married to a Japanese-Brazilian woman, right?) on the phone. So crazy that you were soccer-mates! And that you stayed with them in Brazil! I've kept somewhat in touch with Ben & Becky via my sister, and now that their blog is up and running I love peeking at pictures of Baby Noah! :) Wow, this is insane...
jonathan, that's the eldest. the whole bacheller kids are all boys except for the youngest. josh, the third kid also married a brazilian girl. jonathan, josh and i were on the same volleyball team when we played in a church league in IL. josh is a very good soccer player, and played for judson when they won division II i think. their dad is a very good friend of mine, and he has been trying to get me to go back to brazil, and i did consider it as a possibility before i finalized my decision with thailand. the seminary there in goias needed a computer person. anyway, wow, small world!!
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