"You gotta have faith." George Michael c.1988

Over the past few weeks while dealing with the cause of grief in my life many have remarked how great my faith is, as if I have now reached some sort of Christian high place. A place that is somewhat mysterious. A place that they are not sure that they really want to get to. After all, the people who get lumped into this classification are often the subjects of calamitous events. Either that or they are the elderly ladies of great wisdom in your church.

Well, I have not reached any sort of high place of faith, nor am I one of the sage elderly ladies in your church. If anything, I am simply the recipient of a grace of which I am not deserving. Take the Book of Hebrews, one of my favorite studies; in it the author talks of the ones who by faith parted the Red Sea, slew giants, and walked out of the fire. But he also mentions that there are others. Some, who even though they too possessed faith, were sawn in two. There were some who though they had faith, were forced to wander in the desert, were hunted by beasts, and were persecuted. The difficult thing for us to understand is that neither one of these groups had a greater faith than the other. In both cases, their faith was true and not found lacking. Not fair you say? Well, I am with you on that one. But seriously, who are we to judge fairness? If I have learned anything through this time, it is to leave the fairness issue to God.

To those who comment on my faith, I can only reply with this, the most incoherent of responses: It is not faith. . . well, ok , yes it is. But, it is not me reaching out--it is God reaching down. All I have done is accept this mysterious plausibility that God became man to die for me and in that I attain salvation. With that simple admission made, the Spirit comes to hover over me in that somehow Maternal manner and breathe the breath of life into a dead son of Adam. It is this breath that is breathed on us that we call faith. And it is therefore nothing that we do.