Christians are crazy. The Christian faith is crazy. And that's how I want to be.
Did I get you with the title? I was hoping some of you would read this based on the bizarre-sounding title.
Recently, I've been a little in my head about God. I don't know if you've ever felt this way, but a friend and I were talking about how, right now, honestly, some of the promises and character of God are hard to fully believe sometimes.
I believe that He is good, but I don't always believe He is good to me. Like I'm a special circumstance child who needs more love in the form of hard discipline than the sweet-as-honey love. Or another, I believe God hears prayers, but I don't always believe He hears my prayers. It's selfish really, and evidence of the sin inside of me. By not wanting to pray big prayers out of doubt that God would ever do such a thing for me is proof of the "woe is me" mentality, sinful attitude, and a stubborn heart tat believes I know what's best for my life.
Unfortunately, I'm afraid this thought turns, slowly, into a rocky faith. One that causes you to ponder the massive question, "What is faith?" "If faith is what I'm living off, what am I living for?" When I pray for the health and protection of my family, does it impact anything? When I choose to follow Jesus and not be as the world I am to be... How can I know I'm doing the right thing?
The world relentlessly shoves in our faces the narrative that if you want something changed/done/to happen, you have the power to do it. The theme of "life is in your control" contradicts everything a Christian believes, and it's also just not true. Sure, you can try applying to new jobs, or attempt to buy/rent a new space, but if you are declined, declined, declined... then what. Did you not try hard enough?
The world says "hustle and take care of it," God says, "cast your burdens and cares on me"(Psalm 55:22) and be still." When someone unjustly wrongs you, the world says "don't let them get away with it," but God says, "turn the other cheek." Society sees stillness and waiting as an anxiety-trigger or laziness, but the Bible has way more passages about being still and waiting on the Lord than it does about moving, going and fixing.
I think when we feel stuck in a job, a season, or a situation, we, out of fear, frantically try fixing what we don't like, and then when nothing changes, despite all of our efforts, we get even more anxious as we try even harder to change what makes us feel unbearably uncomfortable and out-of-control.
This is why Christians are so out-of-place in our world. We believe discomfort is not always a sign to do something, but rather a sign that God is moving-- even if we're not to move quite yet, and we have the Holy Spirit to help us have peace when it feels like all of our uncomfortable situations feel dead-bolted to the ground.
Christians are crazy. The Christian faith is crazy. We can have a psychotic-looking peace when nothing in our personal or overall world feels in control. We live everyday with belief that God is constantly working, and despite the physical, mental and spiritual war that consumes every inch of our lives, we can still, with soft smiles and hands raised to heaven say "God is good."
We can sit and find contentment in a job we don't like, in a home that doesn't feel like a home, with friends who aren't good friends knowing that God doesn't make mistakes and He wastes nothing.
Our heroes of the Bible are exactly that because they had psychotic-looking faiths. They were so confident in who God is that they were no concerned about how they cam across to their society. Noah built an ark... David went into war with a slingshot and rocks... Abraham was prepared to kill his only son, Isaac, who he waited one-hundred years for... Mary agreed to be impregnated by the Holy Spirit alone...
From our desperate to be self-sufficient society, faith in God is crazy... but the more I think about how I believe God made the earth, how He wrote my story long ago, how He knows and controls all things perfectly, how I'm living on earth with an eternity I can't physically can't see in mind, that's how I want to be known.
The woman with a psychotic-looking faith, because God didn't let any of them down (the earth flooded, Goliath was killed, Isaac led a generation, Mary birthed Jesus who lived and died as a man to save humanity), and He has yet to let me down.
Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for. By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible. --Hebrews 11:1-3
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