Human

After growing up in the Church, there came a time when faith started to feel so blind and ambiguous to me.

“Just trust, don’t question. You doubt? You don’t have enough faith.”

These were the subconscious thoughts that crippled me when I felt afraid, confused, depressed, anxious, etc. Uncertainties and emotions would be swept under the rug, and I’d make myself blind all in the name of “faith.” And let’s be honest, I still hear these thoughts, and repress uncertainties and emotions, even feel their effects deep in my body like PTSD sometimes. (Am I being overdramatic? Maybe. But also, maybe not). Eventually, I couldn’t sustain this anymore and circumstances in my outside life ripped the rug right out from under me, forcing me to look at the instability of my inner life and giving me two options: walk away from any kind of faith and still be angry, afraid, confused, depressed, anxious; or be angry, afraid, confused, depressed, anxious and persevere in figuring out what’s true about my faith.

In hindsight, my faith got wobbly and disorienting not because I didn’t have enough of it — but because I didn’t really know the thing (or the One) I was putting faith in. I didn’t know the One I claimed to follow, not in the way I needed to know. I knew the right answers in my mind, but my heart had yet to internalize any of it, and you can’t live a life you long to live if you don’t know the One who breathes Life into it.

Faith is not blind.

We put our faith in what we know. Who we trust. And since we see in Scripture (and in our lives, if we have eyes to see) that God is the only One in all the universe who is perfectly congruent in all that He says and does — who embodies love, truth, and life — I get now why we can put our faith with Him even when we’re angry, afraid, confused, anxious, depressed, etc.

I listened to a podcast recently that mentioned a parallel between Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist. In the first chapter of the Gospel of Luke, an angel of the Lord appears to Zechariah, a righteous man without blame. The angel has come to tell him that his long-barren wife will bear him a son. Zechariah does not believe. At the time of this appearance, Zechariah, a Jewish priest, is in the temple offering up incense to God while the rest of the assembly of priests are outside, praying. This daily ritual finds Zechariah in one of the holiest places in the temple and so near to the Holy of Holies — the center of the temple where the actual presence of God lived, before Christ came to dwell in us. Zechariah is as close to the very tangible presence of God as he can get. He is met, face-to-face, with an angelic, otherworldly messenger from God. He is in the midst of wonderful, unexplainable holiness and his immediate response is to step away from it rather than to lean into it. As a result, he must go mute until eight days after his son’s birth, the customary time to name a newborn child in Hebrew culture.

A few months after the angel visits Zechariah, he also visits Mary. He tells her how favored she is by God, that she will conceive a son who will be the long awaited-for Savior of the world. I don’t think what she felt was much different from Zechariah — the fear, the confusion at such a statement. What feels different, though, is that Mary’s question to the angel didn’t lead with defense or self-protection, but with curiosity and a sense that before she reacted, she needed to wait.

The angel answers her question, and if you read the whole story, I can’t imagine all of her confusion evaporated in an instant. But Mary recognizes holiness — holiness in an unexpected place. She recognizes God. For an angel of the Lord to appear to a woman in first century Israel — a teenaged woman at that — was one of the last places anyone among the people of God would expect an encounter like this to happen. And yet, her heart knew what this was. And her response was to listen to that seed of faith in her belly and go with it, to submit and receive.

Zechariah found himself in a place where he should have expected, or at least been unsurprised, to be met by a messenger of God. And yet when he was met with it, he couldn’t believe the message. We don’t know if he was missing a key, intimate knowledge of God in his heart for him to react in this way; only God knows the heart of mankind. But imagine the fruit that would have come from him being mute for 9 months; he would have had two options: walk away and live angry, afraid, confused, depressed, anxious the rest of his life, or wait and listen, step back from what he could do for God, and come to know more of the person of God. And if we read on in Luke 1, we find that God redeems him, and Zechariah listens to faith.

Mary — a young woman who loved God even while she probably couldn’t read and didn’t know the Hebrew scriptures by heart as the young men her age would have known, as Zechariah would have known — knew holiness even when she didn’t expect it; and she followed because she knew the One the seed of faith in her heart beckoned her to trust.

Eugene Peterson used to say, “go where the scent of holiness leads.”

The first step is to recognize God in our midst; the second is to get quiet, listen for the whispers of faith in our bellies and bones, and like hands gently, slowly, strongly tugging on a rope, let her lure and teach us to trust that all we truly long for — belonging, safety, love, home, identity, rest, and the like — are found among holiness; among the very nature of God. Even when it’s confusing at first. Even when our first emotion feels like fear.

Faith grows as we come to deeply and intimately know down deep in our bellies the Maker of heaven and earth; the Potter who formed us in our mother’s womb; the Father who sent His Son as a humble babe to meet us on our level and reconcile us to Himself; the Lover who has done absolutely everything to carve a way for us to return Home.

For this is what love for God is: to keep his commands. And his commands are not a burden, because everyone who has been born of God conquers the world. This is the victory that has conquered the world: our faith (emphasis mine). Who is the one who conquers the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?

1 John 5:3-5 CSB

I think faith is more than belief or trust; I think faith leads us to believe and trust — it seems like a mark of God, a family signet, meant to show us and direct us to where we belong, what we really long for, for “He has put eternity in [our] hearts” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). This is faith: a real piece of Heaven lodged in our beings, like a roadmap, that we must get quiet for and listen to. What if we follow this mark, this call in our hearts, and we are led to Jesus, to righteousness, to our heart’s very desire?

If you have questions and doubt and emotions you’ve been told are “sinful” simply because you feel them — know that God is not deterred. He does not turn His face from you. Our questions, doubt, and emotions are signposts that let us know something needs to be worked out with God. If you have no faith in God, the invitation to know Him still stands. You will find safety, and you will come to know Him when you lay it all before Him in honesty.

May we get quiet, and wait, and lean in as Mary did at the news that the One she and her people had been waiting for over generations would come through the divinity of her God and His partnership with her own flesh. For she trusted the promise that “nothing will be impossible with God” (Luke 1:37), and unto us, our Savior was born.

Help us, O God, to know who You really are; to recognize You in our midst; and place our mustard seed faith in You, the King of the Universe. Even when we know absolutely nothing else, You’ve made a way for us to know You. And that is enough.

Praise and thanks be to God.

For further study: Matthew 13:31-32; Matthew 17:20; Mark 4:30-32; Luke 1; Luke 17:6; Hebrews 11; 1 John 5

Podcast links: Mariology: Understanding the Theotokos ; Can God Satisfy My Heart?