I was taught that faith is a fixed kind of certainty around our most fundamental beliefs … and that it’s pretty much spiritual treason to ever seriously question them. Or the people who emphatically dictate who God is and what He wants … and by extension, who we are and what we should be doing.
As if questioning beliefs and people is equal with questioning God. (It isn’t. Not even close.) But you know what I’ve found? God’s okay with questions as long as they’re real ones and not attempts to loophole our way out of doing the things we should legitimately do. Like, not lie, cheat, steal.
But true faith moment-to-moment requires honesty, which means flexibility, a revolving examination and willingness to adjust and learn what we don’t know but need to.
It requires acceptance. Every day, every moment, the world’s edge clatters against ours as we try to work it all out: wrangling and reconciling old and new beliefs, healing wounds (or sometimes just surviving them), challenging limits, and transforming our go-nowhere patterns so that we actually liquidate enough inner capital to do something useful with it.
Something that really does matter.
Real faith lives on the ground in combat boots and sings lullabies to children and waters the tomatoes and votes its conscience and conviction in the voting booth.
Real faith doesn’t separate all the parts of life. Real faith works an elegant, sustainable wholeness in us, knitting our whole Soul together.
It isn’t some lofty, untouchable ideal in the sky … or a gilded mythology that we recite on command like actors on a stage and then conveniently “exit left” and forget what we’re about. (Hint: living in integrity.)
True faith has vision, and it has hope, but just as importantly, it has skills.
It knows how to survive, how to adapt and evolve, because it simultaneously accepts whatever is showing up and proving true and makes its peace with how that catastrophe unfolds … even when it’s shitty.
Faith gets strong in learning to DEAL.
Faith can stand, and it can kneel. It has devotion and discernment at its core – a deep sacred desire to see all the world come both to freedom and to service to something greater than itself. And when that Something is distant and elusive as only the “Something Greater” can be, real faith accepts that, too, and allows the baffling Mystery to be.
Faith accepts every part of this tribulation road for exactly what it is:
- A Beauty
- A Tragedy … and ultimately
- An Alchemy in progress (anyone working out their own salvation with fear and trembling?)
Given enough time, heat, grit and heart, the process of faith coming to be can transform our pain into power … our confusion into practical devotion … and our understandable victimhood into a kind of Sovereignty that can’t ever be taken away from us.
But that doesn’t mean no one will try. That kind of faith is far too fertile and subversive to go uncontested in a world desperately seeking inner revolution. But at that point, it’ll be too late.
Faith will have already taken its holy and immutable root in us. And the world will benefit from the healing of its leafy branches (Rev. 22:2).
Catalyst Questions to Journal or Ponder
Real faith comes by practice and experience (James 2:18) and carries us through the hard times of our life. It teaches us how to live honestly and ask the right kinds of questions.
What is something you now KNOW to be true because of an experience you’ve had?
There are many things we say we believe, but until we go through something hard, we may not REALLY believe them.
For example, I always said I believed that God was okay with me asking questions, but until I went through my own spiritual crucible, I didn’t KNOW it utterly like I do now.
Now I have absolute faith that God will continue to guide me even when I go off the reservation and into the Wild as long as truth is what I seek. Men (as in, mankind) may have a problem with my ‘deviating’ path – as they count deviation – but God will be with me. And that’s all that matters.
Because I said ‘Yes’ to my own personal journey that took me (and still takes me) outside the systems and ‘authorities’ of men, I now have a proven faith about something I wouldn’t, couldn’t, have had otherwise.
And it makes me stronger, more surefooted going forward. I’m less and less bound by other people’s judgment and expectation when I don’t walk the way they think I should.
Now I know with all certainty: my unconventional road isn’t because of rebellion. It’s because of FAITH – the quick and powerful alive faith that gets forged in the daily fires of Life’s crucible. I just had to have the courage to tell the truth about my experience.
Forged in Light & Dark,
