Aug 30, 2020
I thought about how far-fetched it all sounded. Did I really believe that God created a world with Adam and Eve in a garden and that all was peaceful until a tricky snake caused humans to sin? It sounded fanciful and ridiculous to my common sense. All my life the stories from the Bible were taught to me as truth yet my mind wondered how it was any different than a page from mythology or a story from another religion.
The alternative was to believe that the world came from a bang that happened out of nothing and we are here for no particular purpose. I looked around and saw how beautiful and amazing our world is – our planet is the just right distance from the sun, the vibrant orange and pink sunset, the salty ocean waves, the tiny acorns that fall, the strong oak trees that grow and breathe out the exact substance that humans need to breathe in. To my common sense mind, believing that all the beauty and order came from nothing was just as hard for me to grasp as the idea that God created it.
But I felt left out and sometimes forgotten. I heard testimonies that I didn’t have. I wondered if everyone felt like me and just talked assuredly. Or was there really something more?
Years passed, and life happened. The faint glimmer of hope stayed kindled. It struggled to burn and often teetered between the crux of flaming up and being snuffed out. Yet I found that the tiny spark of faith I had was all God needed. My faith didn’t come as something I had to muster or strain to feel. It wasn’t about fooling my mind into making the stories more believable. I didn’t need to figure out how a bush could continously burn. Or how Jonah survived in the belly of a fish. Or what instinctual phenomenon would have caused the lions to take a pass on eating Daniel.
It wasn’t that easy. It took hardships and honesty. It took me laying all of it before God – my doubts, fears, even anger. And once all the trials had been endured and the honesty of my human condition was laid bare, the little flicker of hope remained. And that’s when Jesus showed up. He erased my struggle by arranging circumstances and creating my own old testament miracle. What a merciful God who didn’t condemn my unbelief but showed up to convince me. I could not explain it away. I couldn’t argue. He was there, and I simply believed. He took a little flicker of faith and ignited a fire. He did what I could never do on my own. When time allows, I love to tell others the whole story of what He did for me.
It’s all true. The garden, the snake, sin, death, Jesus, salvation, heaven. Every bit of the Bible is true. And it’s how we come to know the truth and live a purposeful life of hope. I still know it sounds far-fetched. But so does the miracle of life itself. We think it is unbelievable that Jonah could live for 3 days in the belly of a fish but how much more amazing is the fact that each human grows for nine months in the belly of his mother? Miracles are all around us and that’s why I could never satisfy my need for faith with common sense and science. We sometimes try to smother this need for faith. We pad our thoughts with moral thinking and cushion our actions with good deeds. We crowd ourselves with earthly comforts of things we understand. Yet all this is never enough to fill the void our Maker placed in us – the one that is only filled by having a relationship with Him who created us and everything we know.
If you’re struggling with just a flicker of hope, I pray you hold on. Don’t give up. Keep searching and hang on to faith. God sees and hears you. Cry to Him for what you need. Then wait and hope, for the touch of Jesus is unmistakable and will change your life.
Psalm 90:2 “Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.”
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