i'm having a crisis of faith.
not a Crisis of Faith. but a crisis of faith.
i think i’m not supposed to admit these things because i’m a christian and a missionary and also a squad leader. i’m ‘supposed’ to have my shit together.
anyways, i’m having a crisis of faith.
this month, in ukraine, things have felt… bleak. not like, devoid of all hope, but significantly less optimistic than normal. significantly less optimistic than a christian ‘should’ be.
i won’t go into all of the reasons why, but i will say that some of it has to do with the current state of humanity. and some of it has to do with my sensitive, aching teeth. some of it has to do with human trafficking. and some of it with the Church.
basically, the injustice of the world along with my own selfishness – things i’m already too familiar with – just became really overwhelming.
and then my lovely friend patty took me out to coffee. she let me word vomit all over her for like 2 hours. i felt like i was confessing something really terrible. like she might realize i’m a missionary fraud. but she didn’t look at me like i was crazy-town and tell me how i should have more faith or pray more or something like that. she said “yeah, me too.” and i suddenly felt like i could breathe a little easier.
and then i found this quote –
"That is why faith, wherever it develops into hope, causes not rest but unrest, not patience but impatience. It does not calm the unquiet heart, but is itself this unquiet heart in man. Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it. Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present." Jurgen Moltman
and i think that sort of sums it up. my heart is broken and impatient, while simultaneously hopeful and at rest.
and i think that’s the hardest thing to swallow when it comes to trusting God. how can the world be so beautiful and so unjust at the same time? how can my heart concurrently be so happy and fulfilled and so completely grieved?
but that’s His heart too; it’s full of love for us and full of grief over us.
and it’s Jesus – gentle, humble and sinless, fully God and fully man, put on trial and condemned as guilty, killed for us. and it’s us – more flawed and sinful than we ever could have imagined, but more loved and accepted that we ever dared hope.
that’s life, huh? full of seemingly opposing concepts.
“…we feel morally certain of some things, sure that we’re right, even while we know how often we’ve been wrong, and we need to communicate these things. For instance, I used to think that paired opposites were a given, that love was the opposite of hate, right the opposite of wrong. But now I think we sometimes buy into these concepts because it is so much easier to embrace absolutes than to suffer reality. I don’t think anything is the opposite of love. Reality is unforgivingly complex.” Anne Lamott
unforgivingly complex. and mercifully simple.
