What's Wrong With My Faith

I’d been sick for a long time.  Life not threatened, but not much of a life either.  My husband was everything during that time.  I do believe that I owe him my life.  And, having covenanted with him in 2002, he has had it all along.  He’s a keeper ;)  A vow “keeper” if you will.  He would have husbanded me as long as we both shall live, regardless of what the future promised, or failed to deliver.  But it got better.  After long suffering and endless prayer, I felt hope.  I could see a future.  We both could. 

Many of you know me, or followed my other blog when I fell ill again in 2010.  Lab test after lab test had come back negative, so my doctor gave up on the search.  Being told all hope was lost for me, I lost faith in a lot of things.  What kept me going was my faith in God.  When sick and unable to move, one of the few things I found I was still able to do – at any time – was talk with him.

Shaking and trembling every moment of the day with muscle spasms and deep muscle and nerve pain.  Loss of the ability to grasp things with my hands.  Vertigo, difficulty walking and difficulty with speech, muscle weakness. Spots on my body that felt like they were on fire.  Vision problems.  No, I couldn’t give up so easily.  I had a husband who loved me.  I had three beautiful kids who needed me – one only five months old and still living inside me.  

When my doctor gave up I made the decision to call the specialist who had helped me earlier during a time when my family doctor had run out of answers.  This doctor, a specialist in Environmental Medicine, looked at my health from a unique perspective.  

Dear Aristotle, I believe my doctor can trace the roots of this perspective and its development back to you and your work, and so I am indebted to you as well as to him for much of what follows.  You see, my doctor believed that every effect has a cause, so he was determined to search until he found the cause.  Albert Einstein, you have contributed to my health, too.  You convinced him that the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."  
Thanks guys.  Really.

His approach called for great wisdom, putting in a lot of effort searching medical literature, and being willing to look at health problems from multiple perspectives.  He also had great respect for the design of the human body and the environment we were created to thrive in.  So, my God, over and above all else, I am indebted to you.

After having an intimate encounter with the dark side of the medical system a few years earlier (and my faith in it essentially lost) I found my faith and hope being restored as this doctor’s integrity spoke for itself.  In the past, when lab results didn’t provide answers, my doctors had looked at me like there was something wrong with me (like it was my fault or something).  But this one didn’t.  He really listened to my symptoms.  He trusted that I knew what I was experiencing.  He was even willing to acknowledge when there was a gap in his knowledge (he chose to keep learning).  He admitted when he was wrong about something, and was willing to change his views as he learned more.  

For the first time a doctor was able to look on my health with understanding.  The treatment would take a huge life change, tremendous self-discipline, and a VERY long time.  

I was committed.  Even though it would be a long and difficult road to recovery, each week brought new and noticeable improvements to my health.  I felt like I was healed a little, again, and again, and again – like my prayers were being answered over and over and over.  The way I saw it, this doctor had the gift of healing.  Maybe in a different way than most understand that gift, but it’s how I felt.  I saw an image of the Great Physician.

 

He didn’t see himself as having the ability to heal people.  In fact, he would say just the opposite.  He talked about how the body has a powerful and “instinctive inclination to heal and protect itself.”  He described how after surgery, they place the skin back together and it heals all on its own.  “I don’t heal anyone” he would say.  He understood that there was a greater power at work than himself.  Still, from my perspective, understanding God’s design for the body to heal, and also how God works both through his natural laws and through miracles of healing outside of those natural laws, I believe this doctor has the gift of healing that employs wisdom and intelligence of a special kind, and an intimate knowledge of God’s design for God’s world and for the bodies of his most treasured created beings.  Powerful!

I felt like God had answered my prayer at the beginning of this journey toward health, and I just had to keep walking in faith as I went along.  It would be realized progressively over time. 

I wasn’t the only one praying.  I was absolutely overwhelmed by the number of people praying for me and rooting for my full recovery.  It was amazing.  I felt so cared for.  Whatever hope it offered me, though, it didn’t seem to offer others hope.  

I felt guilty.  Each week these wonderful people who were pouring their hearts out to God in prayer for ME fully believed that God would heal me completely.  They loved me.  They had faith in God’s power.  Each week they would come to me and ask, “Are you better?”  “Have you been healed?”  I tried to explain that God WAS healing me, and that it was the type of healing that would come over time.  But week after week they looked disappointed.  

They seemed to feel like God had not answered their prayers.  I felt guilty for not getting better faster.  I felt like I was letting them down.  I started to wonder if I had been wrong about accepting this as God’s answer to healing in my life.  Did it show some sort of lack of faith on my part that I wasn’t holding out for a sudden miraculous recovery?  Did they feel like this reflected some deficit in their own faith?

What was I to do with passages like Matthew 21:22-25?

“Truly I say to you, if you have faith, and do not doubt…even if you say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and cast into the sea,’ it shall happen.  And all things you ask in prayer, believing, you will receive.”

So many questions.  If I have faith?  Faith in what?  That my prayers will be favorably answered?  Faith in God?  Faith in God’s power?  And do not doubt what?  Can I really ask for anything I want, and receive it if I believe?  Have strong enough faith?  If I don’t doubt?  Are there any limits on this?  From simply reading the passage it seemed clear, just like it seems clear in Matthew 7:7-11. 

“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.  For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks the door will be opened.”

The passage goes on to say that God knows how to give good gifts to his children – he’s even better at it than we are.  He wants to bless us with good things!  Can it really be that simple?  Is there more to it?

These questions have been raised anew.  For those of us reading through the Word together this year a number of us have come across these passages and wondered:  Why weren’t my prayers answered?  Why does healing come sometimes and not others?  Why not me?  Why not my child?  

And what does this say about my faith?  What does this say about my God?  And these questions will keep plaguing us because we have another run-through of gospels to come across them in!  And because we will keep praying.  And because we still don’t understand the choices of an all-powerful, all-knowing God.  We are overwhelmed again by the problem of evil.  We don’t understand what changes when we come to faith in God, and what role the fallen world still plays in our life. 

So, I turned to these passages again because I hope to understand them better.  As I began the search I really didn’t know what I would find.  I know what I believed before, but to really open myself up to what the Bible says I’ve set those beliefs aside for the moment.  I pray that my presuppositions wont cloud my reading of the text, and that God will speak clearly through his Word to me.  That my ears may hear. 

Though I’ve been reading and studying it for a while now my search is still in its infancy.  There will always be another book to read, another article, each new discovery will raise more questions, but there comes a time after holding things apart, and holding my perceptions loosely, that the pieces slide beautifully back together, the picture bigger, brighter, more complete, resolution higher.

Today, I am reminded of the faith of Abraham in Genesis 22.  This story captivated me as a child as it threw my mind in perpetual circles.  How could God ask him to do such a thing?  Why on earth?  He would never!  God is supposed to LOVE the little children!  How could THIS be God’s will?  But, then again, he IS God, and God can do anything, WILL anything…his ways are higher.  Wait, does this mean that God could legitimately command someone to do this?  But what about how God hates child sacrifice?  And around my mind would whirl another time…  I’m glad I learned this story as a child because it challenged my faith.  It drew me to search deeply.  It plunged me into prayer – I asked him question after question.  It brought me wonder. 

 As I approached adulthood this story began to raise new questions for me.  What was Abraham’s responsibility in this situation?  Was it to his son or to God?  What did it mean for him to be a parent? 

He had waited so long for God to give him a son.  The boy, Isaac, meant everything to him.  Looking at his boy surely reminded him of God’s faithfulness – promises fulfilled in God’s time, and of the future promises yet to be fulfilled.   But God’s command couldn’t have been clearer:  “Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you (Genesis 22:2).”  And now, walking up the hill I imagine he pulled out all those videotapes of Isaac’s life and replayed them – relived them like it was just yesterday.  He recalled his birth – awaited 15 years!  What joy!  I imagine that he remembered the laughter at the idea of this impossible child, and how over and over again Isaac had brought them and others such laughter.  

Did Abraham wonder at God’s request?  Did he pray for God to change his expectation?  Did he imagine his role as a father to bring Isaac the maximum amount of happiness possible in life?  To protect him from pain at all costs?  Or was it something else entirely?   Did he understand his role as father to guide his child into becoming the person God imaged him to be? To walk the path of faithfulness in God’s will, whatever that was?  What did it mean to him to be Isaac’s father?  

There was no sign that God would change his mind or provide another way out.  No sign at all.  And yet, he was able to say simply to his servants “Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you.”  WE will come back to you.  What kind of faith did he have?  How did he walk that path, placing the wood for the burnt offering on his son, carrying the fire and the knife himself.  The two of them going on together.  What happened in the heart of this father when he heard his son ask “Father…where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”  From where did he find the strength to say, “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.”  Did he know his God so well to have confidence that he wouldn’t go through with this?  Because of the promises made before he was born:   ^“My covenant I will establish with Isaac, whom Sarah will bear to you by this time next year?”  

Or was Isaac the lamb he was talking about?  He knew what God had said.  He was to sacrifice his only son – Isaac – as a burnt offering.  What kind of faith kept his feet walking the path to the place God had told him about, where he built an altar, arranged the wood on it, bound his son and laid him on the altar on top of the wood.  With what strength did he reach out his hand and take the knife to slay his son? 

It was an act of grace when the Angel of the Lord called out to him, and told him not to harm the boy.  It was an act of grace when he provided that ram in the thicket.  God’s response tells us that this test of faith proved that Abraham feared God – it was because he did not withhold his son.  Indeed, he would not have.

This story resonates more powerfully with me today because it was eight years ago today that we met our first son.  We named him Isaac as we marvelled at the faith of Abraham.  His name is a reminder to me that he is not my possession.  No.  He is entrusted to me – by God – to raise him to fulfill his God-given purpose, whatever that may be.  And, God might ask him to glorify God with his life.  If that time comes, will I still be able to hold onto him with an open hand?  Will I lead him down the right path?  Or will I clench my fingers down around him and refuse to let him go?  Will I remember whose child he is?

In future blog posts I will to explore the place of suffering and death in the fallen, pre-Christ world.  Then I want to take a closer look at these passages about faith and prayer in Matthew (and their parallels), and begin to unravel them a little.  As I do this I worry that it might bring you pain.  I can’t promise the answers will be what you or I want or expect.  I can’t say if they will be satisfying.  They will likely open old wounds again.  I find the journey toward God and his truth can be a painful one.  It often takes time as we wade through difficult material.  Tough questions.  And answers that might be anything but easy.  But it doesn’t end there.  Often a wound that reopens does so because it hasn’t healed.  Not really.  Not properly.  Not fully.  Sometimes a wound needs to be reopened so it can be cleaned, covered, and close.  Overtime its mark will fade, but it will always be there to remind us of the past.  To remind us of the journey.  The love.  The loss.  The healing.

Meet you there.

A Parenting Moment

This was one the most frustrating days that ive had as a mom. Negativity from Isaac. Relentless. It knew no bounds. For his discipline (and protection from his mom who was going to LOSE IT) he was sent to his room...indefinitely. Possibly for the rest of his life. As far as I was concerned for the rest of the night. A little part of me (if I'm honest, and I am) wondered if I could have possibly been wrong about my sweet, perfect boy all these years.

I allowed him to join us at the table for supper. He apologized and asked me to forgive him. I did. We both softened. He asked me if he needed to go back to his room after supper. I asked him instead to write down ten things he loves about life, and to decorate the page because I wanted him to make it look like something really positive.

A half hour later this is what he came to me with, filled with love and joy. 

The smiley face has hearts for eyes to see love, a heart nose to smell great things, and heart teeth so his mouth is filled with love. I LOVE THIS KID! And he is every bit as wonderful as I've always known him to be. We enjoyed the rest of the evening together.

Concerning the Eternal Destination of Stuffies

A number of years ago I made my first attempt to explain heaven to my oldest son, Isaac.  Considering what was at stake it was really important to me to do a good job.  I did my best, but I’m afraid the attempt went downhill fast – it has been recorded in the history books as one of my great big parenting failures (ending with him crying desperately, begging NEVER to have to go there)!  

I confess that as a child heaven didn’t appeal to me either.  The idea of meeting God had me afraid that I would see him, be terrified, and pee my pants.  And just what were we going to do up there…FOREVER??  I loved singing, but that was a long time.   And what was the point if I had to leave behind everything I knew except for God?  A lot of how I knew God came through the people in my life and through my experiences.  Would I even remember those experiences?  Would I recognize the people that I love?  

  

Heaven seemed like a foreign place.   

Earth felt like home.

As a child, and still after the Isaac incident I remained confused about heaven.  I was puzzled by the mixed messages the Bible seemed to send about what exactly heaven was.  In one passage it would say “heaven and earth may pass away” and in another it would talk about a new heaven and a new earth.   

Where?  I wondered.    

When Jesus ascended he went “up” so was it somewhere in space?  Was it in another dimension?  

Other passages about new bodies left me confused, too.  Would they be spiritual bodies?  Would we become like the angels, who often look like humans in scripture, yet weren’t human?  Would I look at all like myself still?  Would the way we look freeze at the age we died?  If so, would some look like little children and others old?   

As a child I didn’t hear anyone attempting to answer these questions so I added them to the realm of “mystery.” But, since the Isaac incident I’ve been unsettled leaving it there.   

Why would God leave us with no answers to this question?  What appeal is there in a completely unknown future?

Second Chances

Now I find myself with another chance to improve on my past parental failure.  My middle child has been asking questions about heaven and hell.  He is really trying to understand.  I wish I had recordings of our conversations to remember his deeply thoughtful questions, his genuine searching and reflecting.  His probing questions found me pulling a book off my shelf by one of my former profs, Randal Rauser:  What on Earth Do We Know about Heaven?.

In this book Randal Rauser proposes a “heavenly equation” to herald the biblical vision of heaven.  I’m just beginning the book and I’m excited to embark on this journey into all the Bible says about heaven and consider how I can communicate God’s Word on the subject to my kids.  I just may do a better job this time!  I’m a little over a chapter in and I can already see that it’s a brilliant, clear, carefully written, and yet sometimes playful read.  Maybe you want to read it with me?

In the following excerpt from the book Randal Rauser illustrates the heavenly equation using one of my favorite childhood stories:  The Velveteen Rabbit.  

[This book] tells the story of a stuffed toy rabbit that longs to become Real.  In a conversation with his close friend the Skin horse, he discusses a question that is bursting with philosophical profundity:

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side-by-side near the nursery fender, before Nana came into the room.  “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the skin horse.  “It’s a thing that happens to you.  When a child really loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with but REALLY loves you, then you become real.”

Rauser expounds, “According to the Skin Horse, when a child loves a toy – really loves it – that love can make that toy real.  And according to the heavenly equation, when God loves his creation – really loves it – that love transforms creation into perfection and thereby makes it real.  The thesis of this book may be an equation, but its heart is a love story, a story of becoming real.  It is the story of how God so loved the world that he sent his Son to make it, to make us all, real.”

I'd like to introduce to you...
 In our home we have one such REAL stuffy.  He’s a little organic stuffed monkey named Nounours (AKA:  Nunu).  The name’s a bit of a long story, but he came to life by the love of a young boy named Oliver.  His favorite since birth, Nunu has grown into a real part of our family.  He has a voice, preferences, a dynamic personality.  He loves.  He hurts (Band-Aids help).  He even misbehaves.  This little stuffy is so real that he can pretend with the best of them.  He has his favorite jokes.  He loves to play.  He says his prayers every evening and professes his love for the One True God.  I don’t know if stuffies go to heaven, but if being real is one of the criteria we just might enjoy eternity with him!

Maybe I should clarify that Rauser doesn’t intend to address the eternal destination of stuffies in his book (or maybe he does…  I’ll have to wait and see).  A quick perusal of the table of contents reveals his book is organized around a number of questions that we probably all find ourselves asking:  Where is heaven now?  What does it mean that heaven will be perfected?  How old will we be?  Will we get older?  Will we all be beautiful?  Will anyone be deaf?  Will we still get thirsty? Hungry? Sleepy?  Will there still be sweet melancholy?  Will we love everyone the same?  Will we have special friends?  Will we still have free will?  If my child goes to hell, will I know and will I care?  Should we hope that everyone will be saved?

Many of these are the same questions I asked as a child and my children ask now.  Kids are born curious.  They naturally seek out information to make sense of their environment.  ALL children want to learn.  As a parent it can be exhausting to answer the non-stop questions of a young child.  Sometimes I’m tempted to give a pat answer or tune out, BUT, when I’m careful to notice, their questions represent much more than I normally tend to pick up on.  I believe that how we go about answering (or not answering) their questions will impact the way they learn in the future, and specifically, the development of their faith.

Passin' the Faith Along

As a parent, I find comfort – a certain parental security – in knowing that my children attend Sunday School where they will learn about God through a carefully thought out curriculum that (ideally) sequentially teaches them everything they need to know about the Bible and spirituality.  It’s also a great idea to have a thought through plan for how we want to go about teaching our children at home.  When both community and home work together, even better. 

A scope and sequence is a great way to ensure that one has (at least at some point) dealt with the most important stuff.  That being said, dealing with a topic at an appointed time will never have the same impact as dealing with a question when it’s burning in a child’s mind.  A child’s question is an opportunity like no other!  Their attention is focused.  Their interest is piqued.  They’re downright ready to learn.

Something else that’s easy to miss is that when learning topics are always prescribed (and the children's questions are deferred because they're not on topic), their questions start to seem unnecessary.  Some eventually stop asking questions (especially if they are always immediately redirected back to the prescribed task).  Other kids become afraid to express their curiosity because it seems to annoy the teacher .  In a Sunday School setting indulging a rabbit trail for a few moments here and there (followed by gently redirecting them back to the task) can go a long way to encourage a continued state of "wonder." 

The Center for Spiritual Growth

Spiritual education through the community of faith is a comfort and provides a necessary foundation for spiritual development, but it’s not meant to be the primary place of learning for a child.  God designed FAMILIES to be the primary center for Spiritual Growth!  It’s no coincidence that this is the context where children typically ask their burning questions.  

In our house the questions come most frequently during our scripture reading as a family, when we reflect on the day together in the evening, and also when they're experienced a confusing event in their life and they're trying to make sense of it.  I might be crazy, but I’ve made it my goal to answer EVERY question that they ask me.  If I can, I attend to the question immediately.  Obviously, that’s not always possible, so I try to write them down and come back to them later.  For me this feels daunting because, let’s face it, I don’t have all the answers.  So much pressure!!  

With each child I've relaxed a little more.  Time has taught me that my kids don’t need me to give them all the answers!  What they need every bit as much as the answers is to develop the skills they need to study the scriptures and the ability think logically so they can continue to learn and grow throughout their life.  As I've studied how children learn I'VE learned that the best way to do this is to resist feeding them the "right answers."  

Here's why:  When the primary mode of teaching consists of feeding children spiritual principles and beliefs to memorize (ie. God loves you; God is good; You are special to God; Sin is bad; Do unto others) they eventually STOP thinking and asking intuitive questions, and ask for answers instead.  They start to think they can’t know/learn anything they haven’t been told.  Later in life they are less able to process opposition to what they have been taught, because they haven’t done the mental work themselves.  Often they begin to blindly accept what they are told as long as they trust the person doing the telling (be it a parent, a teacher, a friend, a commercial, a facebook post…).  It leaves them much more susceptible to the messages and peer pressures of the teenage years.

 

Even though it feels safer as a parent to make sure my kids have memorized all the right beliefs, and it feels like a risk to go about teaching them in a less direct way, in the long run it’s the more secure route to include this kind of education, too! I'll share more about this in a future post about "How Children Learn."

So, I've tried to change the way I approach passing on the faith to my kids.  There will always be a need for clear and direct teaching, but what I'm talking about here is a starting point for their questions.  Rather than always starting with the answers to their questions, I begin with exploration together.   They don't need to be right right away.  They just need to get there.

Depending on the topic and their level of understanding (which, as their mother, I have a pretty good sense of) I try to help them search for the answers in a variety of ways.  This may look like guiding them in searching the scriptures or recalling passages we’ve studied or a passage we've memorized in the past, or sharing a relevant Bible Story.  It might be allowing them to process something new through play.  As much as possible I try to ask them questions that don’t imply the answer, but encourage them to think it through for themselves.  Its takes more mental work on my part (and theirs), and goodness, it takes A LOT of patience.  Interestingly it hasn't taken much more time because the conversations extend over days, weeks, months.  We interact with the events going on in our lives, and it actually becomes a much more natural, organic task. 

I believe that as parents (grandparents, Sunday School teachers, the community of faith) we need to help our kids learn to ask questions, imagine, explore, find answers, problem solve, and be okay with making mistakes and now knowing everything yet.  Demonstrating the limits of our own understanding and sharing with them our never ending thirst for the scriptures and learning will be vital to successfully passing on a hungry and thirsty spirituality to our kids that is characterized by life-long growth.

Many of the questions addressed in What on Earth Do We Know About Heaven are the very same questions my kids have asked.  Typically kids begin asking these types of questions in what Piaget called the Preoperational stage of mental development (Ages 2-7).  While they don’t have the ability for complex logic yet, this stage sets the groundwork for developing it.  They deal with the world symbolically-representationally.  They experiment with real life using their imagination.  This is how they "get to know." Its how they process the real world.  It's how they learn!  Its a necessary stage to go through in order to develop more complex logic later in life.

What can we do to inspire our children to wonder?

So, where DO stuffies go when they die?

In Nunu’s life Oliver plays the role of daddy, and at 32 I already find myself a grandma (and have been one for some time now).  As Nunu explores behavior and misbehaviour he is corrected (and rightly so) by his dad. When he confesses his sin he realizes the gravity of what he’s done, and he feels sad.  Sometimes when he talks about heaven he gets things wrong, but dad’s there to help him understand.   Maybe we should reconsider the relevance of the eternal destination of stuffies!  Afterall, these playful explorations of theology are a natural child-like way to examine just such questions.  In Oliver’s life, we are not so different from Nunu.  We may have different “stuff” inside, but we are curious.  We are loved.  We are real.

YOUTUBE: A short interview with Oliver and Nunu