A Mind to Know

We're talking about faith this week, and if you haven't caught on by now, the phrasing of the titles of these posts should seem fairly familiar to you - they are the criticisms that God has waged against His people, and their idols, for centuries. 

They have eyes to see, but they don't see. They have ears to hear, but they don't listen. They have a mind to know, but they don't seem to be catching on. (If your Christian spidey sense is tingling right now and you're thinking, "Wait a minute because..." hang tight. I'll hit you tomorrow.) 

For now, we're talking about the minds that we have to know. 

Faith is, at its core, not really an intellectual venture, but what we know about God certainly comes into play. In times of trial or trouble, it's helpful to be able to remind ourselves of who God is, who we know Him to be, who He says He is. Sometimes, that knowledge is the rope that we keep holding onto that keeps us from falling into a dark spiritual abyss. (And sometimes, it's the rope we hold onto while we're in that abyss.) 

There are a lot of folk who like to say that you can't know God. That you need expert help in understanding God or knowing anything at all. There are those that say that what He seems to say isn't what He's actually saying at all - we're seeing this one a lot more in our current world. Persons who try to reinterpret the Bible according to some kind of new-found (gnostic) perspective and tell you that everything you even thought you knew was wrong. 

Like when they try to tell you that Isaiah was written by three different authors across a bunch of different time spans.

All they really want is to raise enough doubts in your mind about your ability to understand God or to know anything about them that they get to step in as the authority and indoctrinate you into believing whatever they believe, whatever suits the ultimate purpose they have in teaching the way that they do. Often, this is some pet project they have - "social justice" is a big one right now. Often, these teachings do not correct the Word of God; they diminish it. 

But if you protest that you think it's simpler than all that, they'll tell you that you're wrong and that that is exactly the problem with your faith. With the faith. With the church. Whatever, until they get you to listen to them and accept their "authority" unquestioned. 

If you've been around here for very long at all (this blog, I mean), you know that I don't buy into that. I don't believe that the God who knit you together in your mother's womb and knows every hair on your head would make you incapable of understanding Him on your own. I don't think that's the way He works. 

He says in His Word that if all of the people of the earth fell silent, the rocks would cry out in worship. Rocks. Brainless, thoughtless, mindless rocks (so far as we know). And they understand the glory and the goodness of God? Then, of course we can understand it, too. 

That's what our brains are for. That's what our minds are for. He tells us plainly to love the Lord with all our minds...because He's given us minds for exactly this - to know, to worship, to love. So this is another essential element of our faith.  

Ears to Hear

God has given us eyes to see - and yesterday, we looked at a lesson I'm learning about faith through vestibular therapy. Namely, that sometimes, we have to learn to keep our eyes open in courage when everything seems to be spinning around us and sometimes, we have to learn to close our eyes and trust. 

But God has not just given us eyes to see; He has also given us ears to hear. 

That's the next thing we need to think about when we think about faith. 

We live in a world that doesn't listen much any more. We all know this; we're frustrated by it. Who among us hasn't been in a conversation and known that the other person was just waiting for their chance to respond? Which one of us hasn't been asked a question only to immediately be asked the same question again because the person who asked it wasn't listening to our answer? Haven't we given a piece of information only to be asked for the piece of information we just gave? 

It's frustrating. And we all claim that we don't do it. At least, we don't do it as blatantly and we try really earnestly (sort of) not to do it. 

But the truth is, most of us aren't even listening to ourselves. 

Let me ask you something: what kinds of things are you saying to yourself? Not in the moments that you need to say something to yourself, but in all the times you're just kind of running on auto-pilot (so you think) and aren't really thinking about needing to say anything to yourself?

We make a thousand statements to ourselves every day - often, many more than that. And these little statement become the narratives that guide our lives and operate our days. Most of the time, we don't even notice them. It takes nothing for a new message to sort of sneak in. Something happens once, and we say something to ourselves that seems to make sense in the moment, but then, we keep saying that thing to ourselves until it shapes our moments. And by the time we figure this out, we're stuck in a pattern, in a rut, in a habit that seems, suddenly, almost impossible to break. 

As I've been trying to heal through vestibular therapy and work through what eight months of not being able to properly process my world or my body has taught me to think, I've noticed these things that I say to myself when I'm not even listening. And the strange thing is, I hear them. 

We know this, too. We listen-ish to someone speaking, and we don't think we heard them, so we ask them to repeat themselves and just as they start to answer us again, we answer our own question in their voice. We weren't really listening, not enough to process it, but we heard it. It's in there. 

The same is true with the things we say to ourselves. 

The cool thing is that once you realize the things you're saying to yourself, you can start to decide what those things are going to be. They no longer have to be quiet commitments or secret messages that just slipped in somewhere. You can change the tape. Once you listen, really listen, to the things you're saying to yourself that you don't even realize, you start to hear them as soon as they start. And once you start to hear them this early, you can start to replace them with things that might actually be helpful. 

Like...truths about God. 

Because I'll just be honest with you - more of the time than I want to admit, the things I say to myself are not the things God says to me. They aren't the things God would want me to say to myself. And when I start to ask what God would want me to be hearing right now, I start to listen for His voice and my inner voice starts to sound more like His and all of a sudden, the whole everything has changed. 

For no other reason than that I used my ears for what He created them for - to hear. 

Eyes to See

We're talking about faith - about how we define it, how we understand it, how we live by it. What does it even mean? And I said that I'm learning some things about faith through vestibular therapy. So...what's up with that?

Vestibular therapy is like physical therapy, except it's designed to strengthen your balance system. Vestibular issues cause vertigo, dizziness, lightheadedness, an inability to focus on things, motion sickness, and trouble with proprioception (knowing where your body is and how much force you are exerting with it, for example). So the goal of vestibular therapy is to re-train the brain to process visual and physical cues to maintain an orientation in space. 

In practical terms, though, it's really much simpler: it's trying your best not to throw up while the therapist turns and twists you all around and lets your head dangle off things. 

But that's not what I'm learning. 

What I'm learning is that a lot of it is teaching myself to keep my eyes open when I'm panicked and disoriented and don't think I can stand to keep them open any longer...and at the same time, teaching myself to keep my eyes closed and trust that my body can figure itself out and understand its space. 

And that, I think, is faith. 

Faith is learning to keep our eyes open when we're scared. When we don't know what's going on. When we can't see what happens next or how it's going to all work out. When it would be easier to close them and try to center ourselves in something else. When we want to take a deep breath and back away...or jolt ourselves up and try to run. Faith is just...keeping our eyes open and looking at the disorienting things straight on until somehow, they straighten up. 

And at the same time, faith is also learning to close our eyes and trust. Trust in that still, small voice. Trust in the God who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Trust in what we cannot see, but can only feel somewhere deep inside of us. Trust that if we fall, there's something - or Someone - there to catch us. 

It's courage..and it's trust. That's faith, right? 

Courage...and trust.

There's something in me that relates deeply to this. That understands and feels that instinctual pull that wants to open my eyes or close them, that understands what it means to act against that. That understands that when it's easier to close my eyes, there may be something I don't want to miss seeing. That understands that when it's easier to keep my eyes open, it's because I'm trusting too much in what I think I can see. 

God always talks about how He's given us eyes to see. I just never really thought about it before. Not like this, anyway. 

Not until I had to let go of the hand rail, close my eyes, and try not to fall. 

Then, all of a sudden, I get it. 

I think.  

Faith

What is faith?

It's the fundamental question about...well, everything. And yet, it's one of those questions that most of us aren't quite sure how to answer. 

The broadest answer is that faith is putting your trust in something. This is the core of it, and by this definition - everyone is living by faith in something. Whether it's God, Allah, science, human nature, "goodness" or whatever they choose to call it, everyone has trust in something that is guiding the decisions they make in their life, and this is faith. 

(This is why it's troubling when someone says to keep your faith out of politics; you can't. Every one of us brings our faith to every decision that we make, political or not, and we can't separate ourselves from the thing we put our trust in. Not without becoming hypocrites. It's no less faith just because your foundational "truth" is "science" and not "God.")

But for the Christian, this question is even deeper. Because we want to know not just what faith is - we kind of know because it is our "belief in God" - but what faith means for our living. How does it guide our lives?

How, then, shall we live? 

For many, faith is living with our eyes on eternity, on that glorious day when Jesus will come back and we will go to be with Him because we believe. We put the entire weight of our faith not just on tomorrow, but on a really future tomorrow when it will all make sense and pay off. This is a difficult kind of faith to keep because we don't live in tomorrow; we live in today. And it's really hard to keep holding onto a faith that isn't doing anything for you today.

For many others, faith is about being a basically good person. Doing your best to do the things that God wants you to do. So it becomes a set of rules or guidelines by which to live - don't steal, don't murder, only lie if you have to, try to go to church more often than you don't. It becomes a burden that we put on ourselves, then judge whether we are actually good or if we're failing at it...and either applaud or condemn ourselves on the basis of what we find there. This is a difficult kind of faith to keep, too, because we somehow always find a way to blur the lines and to justify our behavior. (We're experts at this.) 

But the truth is, what we're all really looking for is a faith that tells us not what to do, but how to live. How to approach life. What kind of philosophy we're supposed to adapt.

We want a faith that sets out not a guideline, but a guiding principle. Something we can turn to when we have questions and find an encouragement, a truth, an answer. Something to move forward on. Something that tells us how to look at whatever situation is in front of us. 

What is a life lived in faith? What does it look like? 

We've been asking this question for thousands of years. And we keep coming up with different answers, some of which are helpful and some that aren't. Some really connect with us; others leave us scratching our heads and maybe aren't our thing. 

I stumbled upon another definition of faith - at least for me - in recent weeks, and it's changing the way that I think about things. 

And it's come, from all places, through a season of vestibular rehabilitation....  

Called By Name

All of a sudden, it's harder to just read past all of those names that don't automatically register in the Bible, right? Most of us have spent our whole lives skimming through the reading, not really pausing at all to consider who it is we're reading about if it's not a name we recognize from Sunday school already - David, Moses, Jesus. 

But here we are with the Ishmaelites, and they change the entire story of Joseph being sold into slavery.

And the only reason we can put the Ishmaelites into context is because several chapters and three generations earlier, God told us about Ishmael - by name. 

If we're paying attention, the Bible is full of names that may not seem important the first time we read them, but maybe they come back into the story later. The Edomites, for another example, are the sons of Esau. Esau was Jacob's brother, the one who sold his birthright for a bowl of soup. The Moabites were the descendants of Lot, who was Abraham's nephew and the only righteous man in Sodom and Gomorrah. 

Are you starting to see? 

These are all threads that run through the Bible, and we miss them because we think the names are not important. 

Yet, they were important enough for God to include them in His Word. 

They're important because they help us to see how the world is oven together, not just in God's chosen people but beyond them. Remember in Isaiah when God calls not just Israel, but Egypt and Assyria His? Israel may have been chosen, but the rest of the world is no less God's. There's not a single person who is not God's child. 

And that is why He takes great care to call them by name every chance He gets. 

We can learn a lot from this. 

I'm a big proponent of calling others by name. It's not "the cashier at the grocery store;" it's Christy. It's not "the server at the restaurant;" it's Dana. It's not "the guy who lives down the street;" it's Morris. It's not "the guy I talked to on the phone about that;" it's Spencer. It takes three seconds to look at someone's nametag or listen to them introduce themselves, and it costs absolutely nothing to call someone by name and give them the dignity of a human being created in the image of God. 

Because the truth is, you don't know where their story is going to be woven back in. You don't know how their thread runs through the world. You don't know where or when God is going to pop them back up. 

But how many times have you read the story of Joseph without realizing Ishmael was a part of it? And how much difference does it make to suddenly realise that?

So how many stories have you read in your life without realizing Dana is a part of it? How many times have you read right past Spencer? How many times have you missed the countless number of other persons right in front of you whose thread is woven in right here and...it matters. It always matters. It always changes the depths of the story, always changes how we understand things. 

If God calls them by name, it's a name we ought to know and pay attention to. That's the point. 

(And remember, I'm just as guilty as nearly everyone else of missing Ishmael in this story for...an embarrassingly long time, even though I try to make this an emphasis in my life. So I'm not just talking to you; I'm also talking to me.)