Faith Works 3-13-21

Faith Works 3-13-21

Jeff Gill

Belief in God, and how to get there

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Jesus tells Peter in John 21:18 that: "…another will…carry you where you do not want to go."

Loss of control is part of faith. If everything is in our control, and clear in front of us, it's not faith. It's simply work. We might need to develop some faithfulness to keep at it, but faith is about wider narratives and how our immediate steps are on a path whose end we do not know.

The things I have the most control over, the paths that are most familiar to me, are reassuring, but they neither challenge me nor give me a deeper hope. They have a place: running laps can be good for the heart and even the mind, but the journey of faith asks me to make a turn off the track, and into what can appear at first to be darkness.

Some trips, I have to be willing to let someone else drive. At some point, I may even need to get into a wheelchair and allow someone else to push. And I've known a few times that queasy feeling of laying back on the gurney and having the attendant wheel me down the hall to a place where I know I'm going to sleep, and then . . . well, I have a rough idea, but I'm not sure.

Those are the times I need faith.

I believe in God. This is my most fundamental faith stance, that I believe there is a divine reality beyond and behind the immediate reality I experience, which knits together past and future, my life and someday my death, lives which I've never met in life who have played a role in my own, and the deaths of others who are with me in one moment and in another . . . gone. Gone somewhere, or nowhere? I believe in God, which is a faith that in one dimension extends into believing that those who die go somewhere, in some part.

This is not a universally held way of looking at the world. You can argue that in the decades of my youth and maturity it held sway in American life, but I can both look back and do research today to show that it wasn't a definite majority view even in 1961, let alone in 2021. Oh, you can find surveys over the last sixty years of a vague, diffuse "86% of Americans believe in God" but it's generally of a very loose, uncertain, deistic sort of belief when you get into any details at all. Regular worship attendance on any given weekend has declined in that period from an optimistic 40% at best to something south of 20%, and as I've written about in this space before, a quick objective check of the numbers will bear that out, with no more than 15% of Licking County attending any service at all each weekend when you add everyone up and even round things in a favorable direction.

I believe in God, creator of heaven and earth, who loves and cares about what has been created, who desires to redeem and save it for a new and more wonderful dawn, and who has promised to come down into the muck and mess and complication of life as it is to show by example and patient teaching what it could yet be. I believe, in fact, in God who is with us, which is the same divine creator we know as Father because he sent a Son, a human form of that divinity into the everyday world. And we still have a Spirit with us and in us and working through us to understand how the everyday and the eternal intersect, cross-wise if you will.

And I have to admit that my faith is not entirely my own. I did not get here by my own efforts. I was picked up and carried on the first stages of the path of faith by my father. He taught me, mostly by example, occasionally when necessary with words, though words were not his strong point. He did. And he didn't look over his shoulder often. He just did what his faith led him to do, and expected that God would lead others to follow. Which we did.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's on a journey of faith this Lent. Tell him about your path into valleys of shadow at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.