We live by faith, not by sight.
- 2 Corinthians 5:7
Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.
- Hebrews 11:1
Trust God. Believe in what you hope for. No matter what happens, everything's gonna be all right. Just have faith. It's simple.
I knew these verses by heart, but not by mind. As I grew older, and my melancholy personality began to emerge more fully, I started to question faith. Not my faith in God (I've never really doubted His existence), but faith itself.
When I was a kid, I thought that if I really, truly believed I could fly, I would. I threw myself from countless backyard precipices, expecting to wow my friends with the best Peter Pan impression they'd ever seen, but I fell to the ground every time. After college, I trusted that God would immediately reward my hard work with a fulfilling position in full-time ministry that would provide a comfortable living for my family. Instead, I ended up working multiple minimum and near-minimum wage jobs for two years while I waited on the Lord and battled feelings of doubt and insignificance. I hoped and prayed that my uncle (who was probably the closest thing I ever had to a big brother) would survive his cancer, but he didn't. Apparently this faith stuff doesn't work out so well.
But it's not that simple. God never promised a happy ending to our circumstances. In fact, He promised the opposite:
In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.
- Jesus, John 16:33b
Sometimes church people like to gloss over the issue of pain, but the Bible sure doesn't. For crying out loud (literally), read Job, Lamentations, Psalms, or New Testament martyr stories, and you'll find pain in bulk. Jesus knew it would be tempting to lose heart in these kinds of circumstances. He does offer hope, but that hope comes from beyond our earthly experience.
Contrary to my casual interpretation of Hebrews 11:1, Christian faith is not being sure of whatever we might hope for. The rest of chapter 11 goes on to describe several Old Testament heroes of strong faith, many of whom never received any kind of earthly reward (verse 13b). There were some:
who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, and gained what was promised; who shut the mouths of lions, quenched the fury of the flames, and escaped the edge of the sword; whose weakness was turned to strength; and who became powerful in battle and routed foreign armies.
(verses 33-34)
and:
others who were tortured, refusing to be released so that they might gain an even better resurrection. Some faced jeers and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were put to death by stoning; they were sawed in two; they were killed by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated— the world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, living in caves and in holes in the ground.
(verses 35b-38)
This is reality. Not all gloom and doom, not all flowers and sunshine. The commonality is faith. Faith in what? Read verses 13-16:
All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.
Christian faith is being sure of the hope we have for a better country - a country we cannot and will not see or understand in this lifetime, but one we can be certain of nonetheless. Faith is being homesick for a place we've never been. C.S. Lewis wrote a great deal about this longing, which he called "joy".
In a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else... it is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want.
- Lewis, Surprised by Joy
I remember feeling this the first time I read Lewis' own Narnia stories. I wanted to go there so badly, I actually tried the spell that takes Eustace and Jill to Narnia in The Silver Chair. Sometimes a particular song, place, thought, or memory still brings that kind of ambiguous longing to my heart. And it took me a long time to realize it was God.
Faith is fundamentally mingled with this longing and dissatisfaction (and maybe that's why suffering actually tends to strengthen faith). It's true that Scripture encourages us to "be content in any and every situation" (Philippians 4:12), but contentment and satisfaction aren't the same thing. It might even be that knowing we can never be truly satisfied in this life is precisely the perspective that allows us to accept our circumstances. It's an opti-pessimism.
If you've been around church for very long, you've probably heard it said that everyone has a God-shaped hole in their heart that can only be filled by asking Jesus to be your Savior. I have a problem with that. I mean, I accepted Christ a long time ago, but I still feel empty sometimes. I think Jesus partially fills that hole, but He leaves us an IOU for the rest. He broke our chains, but we still have to stay in the cave for a while. Take a look at that "live by faith, not by sight" verse in context:
For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling, because when we are clothed, we will not be found naked. For while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. Now the one who has fashioned us for this very purpose is God, who has given us the Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come. Therefore we are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord. For we live by faith, not by sight.
- 2 Corinthians 5:1-7
There's still some emptiness. There's still some mystery. But we wait by faith, knowing that we are indeed homeward bound.
The Bible is full of exile language - but if we mistake faith for earthly optimism, we may feel guilty when we groan. Groaning is good. It's a sign of the IOU, the deposit, the very Spirit of God living within us. It's a sign that we're looking toward the cavern's exit.
Remember your failure at the cave!
- Yoda, The Empire Strikes Back
Why is faith so hard? You would think now that we can finally move our necks, we would never look away from the mouth of the cave - where daylight shines and distant images of life outside can sometimes be glimpsed. But the shadows are mesmerizing. They're right in front of us. We're used to them. It's hard not to look at them.
A few months ago, I realized that I had been staring at the shadows for a long time. My mind was filled mostly with earthly things. It had been weeks since I had read my Bible or had a meaningful prayer time. When we weren't watching TV, my interactions with my wife were mostly informational. Even things like TV, music, and books had lost their meaning. I didn't really enjoy things like that, I just used them as a way to get my mind off of work. The Lord sent us a beautiful snow, and all I could think about was what kinds of problems it was going to cause me the next day. I had lost my Joy (for a full confession, see Part I).
Thankfully, the Spirit convicted me of my blindness, and I have been trying to be more faith-full. How? Well, I try to focus my attention on things of heavenly nature. I pay more attention to natural beauty. I pay more attention to my daughter. I try to treat my wife more like a girlfriend than a business partner. I've been reading more and listening to audiobooks at work. This isn't necessarily a new habit, but I've tried to stop thinking of it as an accomplishment ("I can cross that one off the checklist") or a coping mechanism ("What book should I listen to to get me through the day?"), and start reading for the simple pleasure of reading. That goes for the Bible too. I used to read it because that's what good Christians "have" to do. Now I try to read it because it brings me closer to the Father I love. I pray about more than my "daily bread". And sometimes, when my heart feels particularly weighed down by the world, I might sing a few longing lines of an old hymn or two:
"Some glad morning, when this life is o'er, I'll fly away."
"I heard about a mansion He has built for me in Glory."
"There's a better home a'waiting in the sky Lord, in the sky."
"And someday yonder, we'll never more wander, but walk the streets that are purest gold."
"There'll be no sorrow there, no more burdens to bear."
"Lord, haste the day when my faith shall be sight, the clouds be rolled back as a scroll."
"Yea, when this flesh and heart shall fail, and mortal life shall cease, I shall possess within the veil a life of joy and peace."
You don't hear lyrics like that much anymore. In fact, you don't really hear that much homesickness in church at all. We've been laser-focused on our mission in recent years, and I'm not saying that's not an improvement on the somewhat isolated nature of "old time religion", but in the process, I think we may have grown a little too comfortable in exile. Yes, we have a very important mission while we're here. But don't forget - we're missionaries. We're from another country.
