I'm learning a lot lately about patience, or more accurately about how I don't have any to speak of. Do you ever look at your life and say "Wow, God is doing something amazing here," and then you get so excited that you find you can't stand waiting to see what it's gonna be like? This is where I'm at right now.
And I've been here before. Back in January I was stuck in the hospital, waiting day after day for Gleevec to kick in and my white blood cell counts to go down. I was losing my mind. I wanted to get out of there and back to my job. I missed my kids. I missed the Sunday school. I missed feeling like a productive member of society. I missed my freedom and my privacy. And I was scared -- what if the medicine didn't work? What if my Philadelphia chromosome didn't respond? What if I never got back to work, never got my life back?
I think God was using that time to, among other things, wring that doubt out of me. I had to get past thinking "what if." I had to let go of being scared to be wrong. I had to stop being prepared for the worst and just trust God to do his thing. Aaron Shust showed up on my iPhone today and reminded me, "I am not skilled to understand / What God has willed, what God has planned / I only know at his right hand / Stands one who is my Savior." I had to stop preparing myself for the worst, stop trying to understand everything, and just see the face of someone who loves me more than himself, and know that person is standing before the God of the universe and pointing at me and taking care of things. The part of me that was simulating utter disappointment -- taking myself through the steps to be prepared to hear bad news -- that part had to die.
Not because things always work out the way we want. There are more than enough stories of good people suffering bad outcomes for me to know that endings aren't always ostensibly happy, even when you do trust God. But the response to that isn't to expect or prepare for the worst. It's just to trust and concentrate on that. If those horrible things you're worrying about come to pass, it's then that God steps in to take care of it. It's not for me to make backup plans for God. He has planned it, and he's all over it.
So one of the products of those 19 days in the hospital was that I kind of lost my ability to doubt reflexively. That's not to say I don't ever doubt; it's just that my cynical, knee-jerk "well this probably won't work out so get ready for it to fail" reflex was broken. Praise God for that -- there is so much more peace in my life now than there ever was before.
But lately I'm learning how much easier life is with doubt. My buddy Paul back home, who always fills me up with wisdom and good things, wrote a long time ago about how having faith is actually a harder, more vulnerable way to go through life. Some people say faith is a crutch that lets weak-minded people more comfortably tolerate a cruel, capricious universe. I'm telling you it's not so. Doubt is the crutch. Doubt is a cushion.
When you see God working, your heart soars. You dream dreams about how this is going to play out, how the world will change. You careen through delirious joy at God's grace and faithfulness and sheer cleverness in working things out. Doubt keeps you anchored in these times. It tempers that joy and puts a ceiling on your praise. You're thinking, "well, this may not happen, but wow if it does~!" And that's so much safer, because deep down you know if you're wrong, some part of you saw it coming all along. You feel like you'll be more ready for that time.
Without doubt, without cynicism you are totally exposed. The mystified sensation that comes from witnessing the utterly unbelievable is looking for a channel, and can't find one. It's kind of like watching a magic show, I guess -- it's fun and interesting and cool as long as some part of the back of your mind knows that what you're seeing is just a really clever trick. But if you lose that sense, if all of a sudden you're fully committed to the realization that you're watching real magic, it changes everything you thought you knew about the world. Without doubt, it's like that. You can't go back to your base assumption that there's a logical, acceptable, not-nearly-so-exciting explanation for all this.
This leads to a peace, most of the time, that can only be described as "extravagantly intense." Why, then, do people doubt? Wouldn't we have learned by now it's more peaceful and easier to just believe? Why is it so hard? I think that's because doubt gives you the ability to protect yourself. It's your one foot in the boat "just in case" while you're trying to learn to walk on water. It keeps you safe and keeps intact your "illusion of control" (as Nancy says). Life without doubt -- life lived by abject faith -- is actually a lot riskier and takes more effort.
2 comments:
It definitely is scary. I am so glad you posted this.
It is scary as all get out, but man! I wouldn't change it for ANYTHING.
I love how you compared it to soaring. All I could think about was the first time I rode The Batman ride at Six Flags. I couldn't see what was holding me to the track. It freaked me out when I went to get on. But the rushing wind, the not knowing, the trust in the creators and operators HAD to be there. And that made it SO much more fun.
Great sermon,Andy! This is what I bought you the journal for. I'm glad you are blogging this stuff. It's intense, deep and critical thinking,son. Our sermon in church today was from James. "Count it all joy when you endure trails". It is a crucial way to live. Out of the boat and standing on the waves. I think that is why we must come to Jesus like a little child. They don't worry about the impossible. They don't even know the impossible. the challenge is to keep our hearts from becoming jaded. We can only do that by keeping ourselves from trying to be prepared for the let down. So through endurance we remain confident in the impossible, and joyful in the ride.
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