Faith

I'll be honest - it's been a tough week for me. 

Anyone struggles in the acute healing phase of a major surgery; I sadly know this too well, but it doesn't keep it from being true. You put your body through this massive trauma, where someone literally makes you unconscious, cuts into you, does unimaginable things to your being, then wakes you up and tells you good luck. Then, your body is trying to process both the trauma of being so incredibly disturbed and also the onslaught of the chemicals (medications) required to make it possible to even do this sort of thing, and there comes this point where you're simply overwhelmed...no matter how strong you are. 

Or maybe it's just because I'm getting older. Maybe I really was better at this in my 20s. But I probably wasn't. 

In the past week, because of these two factors - trauma and chemicals - I have wrestled with things that I don't normally have to deal with. They just throw my entire system out of whack, and it's hard for me to stay on firm ground and find any footing at all. Add to that that you're usually separated from your regular routine - I can't run, I can't exercise, I can't go to work, all the things that give meaning and structure to my life - and it's simply a recipe for some really hard days. 

Now, everyone who knows me knows I have a bedrock of faith. They know I'm a chaplain and that I have counseled others through this very sort of thing. They know what I believe on any given day, and they know how strongly I believe it. They know, especially in this season, that I'm coming into a time of renewed faith and love in Christ. They know that I have these tools at my disposal. 

So it's no surprise that over the course of the past week or so, I have received a number of lectures, of mini-sermons, of notes of encouragement reminding me of the truth of God's Word, His promises, His goodness, and all of the things that I know and believe that are supposed to build some kind of hedge of protection around me and keep me safe from the very dark things that trauma and chemicals do to my mind and my body. 

Except...

One of the things that trauma and chemicals do to my mind and my body is put up an impenetrable fortress that somehow keeps faith out. 

And that's what I want to talk about...because we don't talk about it enough. Sometimes, in this world that we live in - a world that is wonderful and marvelous and broken and weird and a whole host of things in between - faith simply isn't enough. Faith simply doesn't exist as a resource that we can draw on all the time. 

We want it to. We want to believe that it does. But sometimes, things come in and separate us from the ability to draw on faith in the same way. In these times, faith can seem empty. Or hollow. Or weak. Or foolish. Sometimes, it just feels distant, like it was something some other person in your skin could believe in another time and place, but not you. Not in this one. Sometimes, it feels like faith just doesn't even matter. 

In times like these, being told what we know, being told that we know better, being told that we believe better than this, being told that we're "sure of" something...because maybe we have been sure of it, even for a really long time...is almost cruel. I have just wanted to shout back at persons - I don't believe that right now. I can't believe that right now. That doesn't mean anything to me right now. 

But of course, when I have attempted to do so, they simply laugh it off and say, "Yes, you do." 

But no, I don't. I really don't. There are times when faith is just not there as a resource, for whatever reason. And it doesn't mean that I don't believe any more the things that I know are true. It doesn't mean I don't still love God. It doesn't mean that I don't believe that God still loves me. It doesn't mean that what I have believed forever, and what I still believe, isn't still true. 

It just means that right now, it doesn't feel big enough. And there's no amount of trying to cling to it that changes that feeling. 

This is just the human condition. 

So...what do we do about it?