Today, I had several conversations with
people that cemented my faith in a loving, personal God. To be honest, none of the conversations
are probably of the type that you may be thinking about when you read about
cementing faith in God. No one
told me some kind of life affirming story. No one gave me some clichéd line about how loving Christ
is—words such as that turn me off more than anything else.
God is not a cliché, although we do get clichéd versions of Him.
God is not a caricature, although many of
those proclaiming to be His followers often turn Him into one.
God—the true God that is revealed through
Christ—is not the kind of God that you believe in. He is the God that
you put your faith in.
Now, back to those conversations. The conversations, to varying degrees,
all involved suffering, which is why I was reminded of God. I am of the firm conviction that in
suffering you find God, or you at least discover His presence, even if it’s an absent presence, which, in some odd way, makes His presence
all the more real.
A dear friend of mine told me this evening
about how hard it is to live with his father. His father has severe dementia, and is often quite violent. He tries his best to take care of his
father, but some days it feels as if it’s too much. Immediately before this, we were discussing God, and I could
sense my friend’s question, although he never really asked it. Where is God in all of this? Why does life have to always be so
difficult?
My wife called me at lunch-time today, to
tell me about a friend of ours who is going through some very difficult times,
and she doesn’t know what to do.
She recently lost her job, doesn’t have another one, and is going to
have to move out of her house—along with her children—but has nowhere to
go. I wanted to tell her that it
would be okay, that God has a plan for her life, as hard as that is to fathom
at the moment, but I didn’t say it.
(I, after all, try my best to not represent God in any clichéd manner,
either.)
The third conversation, I won’t go into
any detail over. It was simply too
personal, but let’s just say that a friend of mine feels as if his life is
pointless. God has taken away
everything that matters to him—or, at least, that’s how it seems.
I sat down at my computer with a cup of
coffee this evening, and I had every intention to write something decidedly
different than what you are currently reading, but then I thought about these
conversations, and then I thought of a
quote from the Romanian priest George Calciu: “Christ did not come to explain
human suffering, or to eliminate it.
Rather, He came to fill human suffering with His presence.”
This is the God we worship as
Christians. This is the God that
we put our faith in, that we believe—if
we want to talk about belief—illumines our lives in all of its messiness, and
in all of its brokenness. In all
of its suffering.
And this is why, I think, that we can talk
of faith as a deep, abiding trust in God.
This is faith as trust, faith as assent. In Latin, it would be translated as assensus. If we
are to talk about belief, then we must talk about this kind of belief. The belief that Christ is good, that we can trust in Him,
that we can assent to his path, to following his Way.
This is the Christ spoken of in a
well-known prayer from Celtic Christianity[1]:
Christ under me
Christ over me
Christ beside me
On my left and my right.
This day, be within and
Without me,
Lowly and meek,
Yet all powerful.
Be in the heart
Of each to whom I speak,
In the mouth of each
Who speaks to me.
This day, be within and
Without me.
Lowly and meek,
Yet all powerful.
Christ as a light
Christ as a shield
Christ beside me
On my left and my right.
And it is this Christ that fills life’s suffering with His
presence.
Faith as a deep, abiding trust in
God. Faith as a deep, abiding
trust. Faith as deep abiding.
I
abide in Him.
He abides in me.
Together we abide in one another.
***
My favorite living filmmaker is Terrence
Malick. I also happen to think he
is the greatest Christian filmmaker
working in cinema, a fact that, unfortunately, seems to be lost on both his
critics and Christians alike.
Suffering, and the presence that fills that suffering, is at the heart of his
recent movies. In his most recent
work To the Wonder—his most
critically maligned film, I might add, once again because not many seem to
understand it—the main character Marina falls deeply in love with Neil, but he
leaves her for another woman, comes back to her, but then leaves again
later. She loves him, but her life
is primarily filled with suffering due to this love. At the end of the film, she is still suffering. It seems as if it won’t end. And yet her final words are: “this love
that loves us… thank you.”
Life is suffering. But He abides in us, and we in him,
this Love that loves us.
Thank you.
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