Do you ever struggle with your faith? I’ll be honest, there are times that I do. I’ve been a believer and follower of Christ for fifty years, since I was a very young child. There have been times in my life that all goes well and my faith in God is strong and undoubtable. I can feel God’s Spirit so strongly that it seems I could reach out and touch Him.
Then there are times I feel a little off; like I’m fighting this battle alone. I know I’ve talked about this before, but since we’re all friends and in the interest of being totally transparent, it’s still something I struggle with.
Maybe struggle is the wrong word. So I went to my favorite reference book, Noah Webster’s original dictionary and looked up the word struggle and found something interesting for me to chew on today:
STRUG’GLE – (This word may be formed on the root of stretch, right, which signifies to strain; or more directly on the same elements in Latin, to wrinkle and English, to wriggle.) 1. To strive, or to make efforts with a twisting or with contortions of the body. 2. To use great efforts; to labor hard; to strive; to contend; as, to struggle to save life; to struggle with the waves; to struggle against the stream; to struggle with adversity. 3. To labor in pain or anguish; to be in agony; to labor in any kind of difficulty or distress.
Well, none of those specific definitions describe my thoughts or feelings. However, the very first part that Mr Webster put in parenthesis, feels more like my day to day challenge. Most of us rarely have to deal with the hard truth of struggling for survival. And yet, we all can relate to the part of struggle that makes life uncomfortable, causing us to stretch or strain outside of our comfort zone.
I know that I’m not alone or the first to ever feel this stretching or wrinkling of life. We’ve all had things that didn’t go as planned. For the believer, this sense of struggling is a tool that God uses to teach us, to encourage us to go a different direction, to believe that – even though we can’t figure out how – God’s got this and everything is going to be ok. Its called faith.
I think I’m in pretty good company with regards to struggling with my faith. It’s not that I doubt in God’s power or love or wisdom for my life, I don’t. God has always proven himself over and over in more situations than I can write about. Reading about Abraham and Sarah, I find some kindred spirits.
In the book of Genesis, God told Abraham eight times that He would bless him with more descendants than there were stars in the sky. And God didn’t just hint about it. He specifically told him seven times before Abraham had any children at all and then again when he was willing to kill his only son in obedience to God. God made a promise and God always keeps His promises.
Abraham and Sarah believed the “what” but struggled with the “how”
What – God would make Abraham’s offspring as numerous as the stars in the sky.
How – The details on how God would accomplish it. The how took hundreds of years. Neither Abraham or Sarah actually saw this come to pass. But God counted them as righteous and they are referred to as pillars of faith because they believed the what. They may have struggled with the how, but the part God was most interested in was their response to the what.
This is where faith lives. It’s when we “help” God by working through our own details to try to get to God’s what that we as Christians mess up. We are left dealing with the consequences of upstaging God and His plans for us.
When I break down my struggle with faith, it’s not that I doubt the what. If God says it, I believe it; end of story, no questions.
What I realized I struggle with is the how of God’s promises. Because His ways are so beyond what I can think or imagine, it’s hard to comprehend His how. But that is my lesson for today: believing the what, that’s my job. God is interested in my response to His what. All He asks of me is to believe that what He has said and promised is real and that He will take care of the how.
I need to have patience and acknowledge that the hardest part is waiting. It may take more time than I have on this earth for God’s how to be seen. But then I remember that, as the creator of time, He runs on a different schedule than I do. Because God’s part of the deal is dealing with the how, I can relax and know that I’ve done my part if I believe His what with all my heart.
But you must not forget this one thing, dear friends: a day is like a thousand years to the Lord, and a thousand years is like a day. The Lord isn’t really being slow about his promise, as some people think. No, he is being patient for your sake. He does not want anyone to be destroyed, but wants everyone to repent. – 2 Peter 3:8-9
