FAITH IS NOT AN ARMY TANK
Helen's faith has failed. Her husband, still young, once a successful physician, is now confined to a nursing home. He has Alzheimer's Disease. Over the months since his diagnosis he has grown progressively out of touch. Today he hardly knows Helen.
She has sold their home to help cover her deepening financial crisis and is looking into selling some of her jewelry. Her friends have distanced themselves, they feel helpless and unable to handle their own dismay. Helen herself, wounded in spirit, is pulling back from social contacts.
Her lament to me today, however, is not about her troubles but about her lack of faith through all this. Sorrow, anger, and frustration batter her soul. Depression lurks at the door and threatens to take up total and permanent residence in her spirit.
God seems to be nowhere around, she sighs. Her prayers, mere cries, feel empty and directionless. Ordinarily a spirited, vivacious woman with an expressive faith, she appears wan and defeated. Helen is disappointed in herself that she is so crippled by, and heartsick over, what is happening. A person of faith should do better, she believes. A good Christian should, she says, find her faith giving her courage, hope, and even cheer in times like this.
No Army Tank. I talk to Helen about her faith. I tell her that having faith is not like riding in an Army tank, protected on every side from the onslaughts of life, rolling smoothly over every pothole and obstacle in the path.
Faith is, rather, like walking with little protection into a war zone. You're hit from all sides and wounded, but you continue on with a Companion at your side who is injured every time you are, but still holds you. Like many people, Helen seems to believe that faith is separate from the person. The individual may be bludgeoned, but faith should keep thriving, untouched..
Reality teaches something different. When life hammers it’s inevitably harsh and sometimes savage blows, we are knocked down--faith and all. Staggered and bloodied, we and our faith, struggle to get up again, to go on, to endure, to recover.
Helen can't possibly expect her faith to be healthy and robust; she's been "run over by a freight train." She is wounded, deeply wounded. Her world has collapsed. She has lost her security, her dreams, and her husband. He is like a stranger, and years of worsening distress lie ahead for them both. How could she go through this any differently than she is? How can she expect of herself resilient, normal, wonderful faithfulness in a time like this?
No Guarantee. Helen is suffering. Suffering brings serious pressure on a person and her faith. That is what suffering is, a painful disruption of one's whole life--physical, social, emotional, spiritual.
There is no easy solution to Helen's pain. The healing capacity put within her by her Creator can eventually restore her. Nevertheless, she has no guarantee she will emerge from her struggle better instead of bitter, deeper instead of more shallow. The support of the community of faith around her is her greatest hope.
Perhaps we can inoculate future Helens against the same kind of spiritual despair over faith's failure. We can do so by modifying the conventional image of faith we pass on to our children--by dismantling the Army-tank model. This model sets everyone up for disillusionment--or it prepares them to see faith as the denial that anything hurts.
Faith, we need to see--and to teach--is not the capacity to eliminate pain. It is not a spiritual strength that makes life's heartaches hurt less. Faith is not a spiritual superiority that lifts one above the ordinary tears and grief of life. It is not immunity from disease, failure, or loss, and it is not armor against the perplexity, despair, and confusion these troubles usually bring with them.
Quite the opposite--faith is freedom to enter pain, to feel it for what it is. Faith is the capacity to experience life at full strength, to mourn personal and global threats and losses, to enter--as raw-nervedly as mere people can--into our own and others' diseases and agonies. Faith, at it's core, is essentially the ability to suffer.
Rather than a power model of faith that makes us think we can and should be super-persons, we need a weakness model. God has revealed himself to us as one who has the courage to hurt, not as a hero who shrugs blows off. God, in Jesus, entered our condition, our pain, our humanness. He did not stride valiantly above it all, he agonized.
Faith is an awareness that God is alongside us in all circumstances. God has been there, and God is there with us, all the way, come what may. "If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there...even there your hand will guide me." (Ps. 139:8-10).
We need to equip ourselves and our children with this more biblically realistic teaching. Otherwise we promote and practice Christian faith as another self-help technique that denies the actualities of life in this broken world.
Life is difficult. The storms will be there. We will be knocked about. Christian faith grants no immunities. We have only the knowledge of the presence with us of He who accepted no immunity.
We may not feel His presence when earthquakes shake, tornados destroy; or when we're ripped with sorrow, anger, or fear. We will only be able to remember it. He hurts with us and weeps with us. He is taking every blow we get. He is with us, holding us.
God seems to stress far more his suffering with us, his entering into our circumstances, than he does his power over everything. "The weakness of God is stronger than man's strength," says Paul, stressing this point (2Cor. 1:25). And God says, "My power is made perfect in weakness." (2Cor. 12:9).
The Christian life of faith is thus an invitation to humanness, an invitation to walk accompanied by our suffering Lord, unprotected, feeling the pain that life brings. Then, and then only, do we gain the potential for abundant living.
