Faith

One of my favorite books of all times is a book called "Messy Spirituality" by Michael Yaconelli I will pull that book out and read certain chapters It "fills me up" when I go through a dry spell spiritually He also wrote several articles which are posted on the Youth Specialties website The following quote is from his article "Annoying Faith"



Why does faith seem so life-changing in other people’s lives and so inconsequential in our own? Why does the healing power of faith seem so potent in theory and impotent in reality? Why does faith seem to make such a difference in testimonies and books and so little difference in the real relationships of my life?

I have begun to understand the answer to those questions. I am starting to realize that I have not expected my faith to make a difference in my relationships, I have expected my faith to make my relationships easy. I haven’t wanted my faith to make me face the issues in my life, I have wanted my faith to help me avoid the issues. I didn’t ask my faith to give me the courage to do what needed to be done, I asked my faith to do what needed to be done for me. I wasn’t asking for courage to do the difficult, I asked, instead, for the removal of the difficult. I didn’t want my faith to make a difference, I wanted it to remove the need for a faith that made a difference. I didn’t want my faith to give me clarity in the midst of a difficult situation, I wanted my friend’s faith to give him the clarity he needed to quit making the situation difficult for me. I didn’t want everything to work together for good, I wanted everything to be fixed. I wanted faith to change everything but me. I wanted faith to change my circumstances quickly, without any discomfort or pain.

I am beginning to understand that faith is not the way around pain, it is the way through pain. Faith doesn’t get rid of the opposition, it invites it over for dinner. Faith doesn’t give you the winning point at the last second, it ties the game and sends you into overtime. Faith doesn’t give you the solution, it forces you to find it. Faith doesn’t teach you at the moment, it teaches in retrospect. Faith doesn’t provide a net to fall into when your fingers are about to give way as you hang suspended over the cliff, faith gives your fingers the strength to hang on just a little longer.

In other words, faith doesn’t do anything when it’s doing something. Faith doesn’t change anything when it’s changing things. Faith doesn’t make a difference when it’s making a difference. Faith makes itself known in life’s difficulties by making the difficult more difficult. Faith doesn’t comfort, it discomforts by forcing us to recognize its unwelcome presence. It is a nuisance, really, an interruption when we don’t want to be interrupted. It gets in our faces and reminds us that it is not irrelevant, even though it seems irrelevant. Faith is the annoying recognition that demands us to take our relationship with Christ seriously, when taking it seriously doesn’t seem to matter. It is God shouting to us in our circumstance, "Faith in Me does matter; you figure out how!" It is the persistent, nagging presence that feels like an absence.