Wednesday, November 19, 2014

The Battle to Believe



I was reading an online devotional this morning and this phrase caught my attention, "The battle to believe,"
I remember as a teenager talking to a man who was friends with our family.  A man who called  himself a Christian...but was having major doubts.  He said to me  "Do you  really think, if it rained forty days that the water would cover Mt Everest?"  He simply could not believe that.  (and btw, I think that in the antediluvian days there were not any high mountains.  I believe that the trauma of the flood and plates shifting on the earth as a result, caused the high mountains to be formed as well as volcanic activity.   We saw recently in the Philippines that one major storm created rivers in the streets, covered the shacks people called home and washed people away just as must have happened in Noah's day.  But back then, as a teen, I did not have any explanations.  I simply believed.  I believed it was true because God said it was true.  Belief for a child is easy....

But what about when you watch your best friend die?  Or your child?  Or you suffer crippling pain?  Is it so easy to believe then?  When Job lost family and belongings and riches....he refused to stop trusting God. ("Though he slay me, yet will I trust him")  But he DID question God.  He questioned God so much that God came to him in a whirlwind and asked him some tough questions.  He asked Job questions about Creation and Nature...things that Job could not answer.  And God showed him that just as in  Nature there are mysteries, so God's dealings with us are sometimes inscrutable.  And truly "it is not for us to reason why".  Some answers belong to God alone and we DO need to call on the faith of our inner child.  That unquestioning, "You said it, so I will believe it" faith.

Some people have more trouble believing without question than others do.  I have a friend who is a physicist and although the wonders of science have shown clearly the evidence of a Supreme hand governing all things and creating inexplicable wonders....just as his background affirms God, it also causes him to question.  Scientists do not easily believe without question.   But that does  not mean that God does not have an answer that he does not choose to reveal to us now.  It just means that  God's answers are too big for our minds to comprehend, regardless of how high our IQ''s are.

I have many illnesses...most of them are caused by a wacky immune system.  These diseases have robbed me of a normal life.  They keep me up  night after night in terrible pain.  And yet, even now,  I do not question God's reasons. I just trust that he has one and someday from the vantage point of eternity, I will see clearly what he was "thinking of" when he wrote my medical chart.  And it will be a wonderful reason---one so good that I will be moved to gratitude for the privilege of having lived these illnesses.  But until then....I walk one aching step at a time,....waiting for the completion of all things when these questions will all be answered.

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