Author: Paula Rinehart
"I suspect that much of what I formerly called faith is little better than having invited God into the parlor of my life while I checked his references. I was not sure that I could risk giving him the full run of the place. Sometimes I have felt frustrated with his apparent absence, wondering why he seldom seemed present in a more immediate way. And at other times I have wanted him to go away and leave me be.
God is moving me toward something qualitatively different. it is a faith that is wide and free and at ease with uncertainty.
This kind of open-ended trust always seems to come unexpectedly. It comes only after some stinging disappointment causes your box to collapse. The paradox is that this kind of trust begins in those unlikely moments when there is no experiential reason to believe. Only then is there room for real faith to take root. it is born in the fearlessness that comes when you've already lost a good portion of what you were so afraid of losing in the first place. It sprouts at a point of contradiction.
The movement toward genuine faith is marked by choosing to trust God even when we know the outcome may be different than we had ever imagined. We let go of our preconceived notions of how things ought to be. If life is a river, we jump right into the middle and let it take us where it will.
That kind of faith is new to me. I hardly know how to make my way around in it yet. Spiritual prescriptions and techniques on how to live the Christian life-I have a whole repertoire of those. But I am just now moving beyond the simple answers into a place where I can enjoy a relationship with a Person, sometimes elliptical, full of ebb and flow, desert and garden. I am learning to let the dissonance feed my newfound trust."
Check out Galatians 5 (very good reading!)
Wow! Awesome post--it's something I've been dealing with for awhile; that is, giving EVERYTHING to God and not holding back. I know my walk with Him could and should be much stronger than it is.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing!