Faith Works 3-9-19

Faith Works 3-9-19

Jeff Gill

 

A godly stumblebum

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Physical therapists have long enjoyed saying to patients that "Walking is controlled falling down." It's true.

 

In order to move forward, you basically have to throw yourself off-balance and catch yourself mid-fall with the opposite foot . . . again and again and again. A long stroll is a controlled fall, all across the landscape.

 

If you don't run the risk of ever being off-balance, you'll never make progress.

 

In somewhat the same way, I believe in Christianity because on the one hand (or foot) I believe it's true, and on the other hand, because it works.

 

Saying I think Christian faith is true might be a longer discussion for another day to some of you. I'll try to skip ahead just by explaining this belief in this way: my faith has reference to an objective reality that may be greater than my perceptions, but can in part be understood. Not perfectly, by me, but ultimately understandable, and valid in so far as I can understand it.

 

Or, I believe it is true.

 

And that I think it works? Well, I believe Christianity works in large part because I know I need grace. Forgiveness, if you will. Because I keep falling down.

 

There are some critics of my second argument who claim that guilt, personal and social varieties, comes from doctrines of sin that are creations of churches. Sin is a tool to keep people feeling guilty and anxious and putting money in the offering plate. An interesting argument.

 

Anthropologically, I think sin and guilt are a little bigger than the churchianity conspiracy proposed in that model. Psychologically, we're all still wrestling with Paul's statement "I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do . . . For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do, this I keep on doing." (Romans 7:15-20, NIV)

 

However you interpret it, I think it's a human universal that we struggle with our tendency to want to do wrong things. Wrong for us, wrong for others, wrong even if no one else ever knows we did it.

 

And that knowledge haunts us. Why am I this way, can I ever change, and even if I do, what or who can help me stay on that path and think it worth the effort even to try, let alone to fail? Which we will.

 

Working with addicts, I hear people say proudly "I've been clean twenty days!" And I hear others say skeptically "do you know how many times they've been clean twenty days?" And I know people in our community who have been clean twenty days twenty times, but have now been clean twenty years. When and how do you help people get back up? My default is to say "every time," because my imperfect knowledge of eternity and infinity also means I never know which time falling down is going to be the time they get up and do not fall again. I just know it is possible, and that the weight of previous failures should not be carried when you're ready to rise up and move forward.

 

As for them, also for me. I am a godly stumblebum, myself. I've made many mistakes; quite a few even in the recent past. I still fall. But my belief in God's grace helps get me back up, and leads me to lean forward and risk falling again, so that I can move and help others move onwards with me.

 

If I get too in love with being godly, I'm likely to make a mockery of what God intends to do with me. Godly is good, but grace is better. A godly stumblebum, falling forward again and again, sometimes with the occasional faceplant on the pavement of life, but knowing that stopping and sitting and staying where I am is not what the God I love, the Lord I honor, wants for me. So this godly stumblebum gets up, and starts falling again.

 

If you see a group of people walking together, just consider this: they are all falling together, some more elegantly or easily than others, but they are also catching themselves, at different points and in a variety of ways, and swinging forward step by step, fall by fall.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's not sure he's ready for Lent, but too late for that! Tell him where you stumble and fall, and rise, at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.