Your faith will come back to you. I promise it will. If you've put in the work, if you've build your foundations, if you've been loved by God (and you have), and if you want it to, your faith will come back to you. And you don't even have to cling as tightly to it as you thought you might.
Because what happens is that we get this rocky places in our lives, these struggles we weren't expecting and these seasons we didn't ask for, and we chip away at them with everything that we have in us - every bit of faith, every bit of believing, every bit of fruit, everything we can muster - until they become little piles of pebbles, little bits of debris.
Then, if we're paying attention and if we're really engaged, we take one or two or three of those pebbles, however many it takes, and we use them to level out a place in our faith that was a little unsteady. A place we didn't realize was a little off, but that has been exposed by our most recent season.
I get that these seasons are not things we're often excited to add to our story. Most of the time, we want to just move on, move past them, forget they ever happened...hope others forget they ever happened. Most of these seasons are not times in our life that we want to remember.
They certainly aren't going to become cornerstones.
And that's not what I'm saying. They don't have to become cornerstones. They just become little shims. They just become little tweaks. Like when you've spent the whole day installing a new vanity in the bathroom and you finally get it all together only to discover that maybe your floor is not quite as level as you thought, so you just tuck a little piece of something up under one side of the countertop to keep the lipstick from rolling away.
Like that.
Your faith needs tweaks like that from time to time. Like an old house, it just settles over time. It leans in a little bit over here, and it pokes out a little bit over there, and there's a well-worn path through the floor of it right here and there's a bit of dust gathering in a cobweb to your left and it starts to creak in places that didn't used to creak before and cracks start showing up...not because you're doing anything wrong, not because the foundation is bad, not because the structure is failing, but just because that's the kind of life that we're living.
Sometimes, you just need a little piece or two of something to level a place out again. And that's what these seasons in our life give us.
They don't have to reshape our faith. They don't have to completely overhaul it. There's a narrative in our world, our Christian world, that wants to tell us that God gives us the storms so that we come out of it clean with a brand new faith and a whole new outlook on life and all the broken things having fallen away and...and wow, that's exhausting and not even true.
Most of us just come out of these seasons living in the same old houses of faith that we've been building for a long time. These seasons just give us the little tweaks that we need to fix the little things that bother us. You don't have to tear the whole thing down every time something happens.
Just take a little piece of the season you've been chipping away at and use it to level a little place that got a little droopy over the years. It's just that simple. And that little piece becomes part of the charm of the whole place.
That's how faith works.
Even in the seasons when it doesn't feel like it's working for you.
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