Wondering Wanderings

I have mentioned in the past I have felt like a Supreme Waffler in matters of faith.  One moment I’m fine with saying, “You know what?  I have faith for XYZ, and that’s okay.  It’s cool.”  But then I’m in a room with people with big, move-entire-mountain-ranges-into-the-sea faith, and I wonder . . . I ponder . . . I (dare I say it?) . . . I doubt.  Not so much in God’s Word or His provisions.  I mean, He’s God – He doesn’t mess things up!  No, it’s more a question of what I’m missing that is keeping mountains from moving (Matthew 17:20) and trees from uprooting (Luke 17:6).

Too often I forget the following:

I realize how kind God has been to me, and so I tell each of you not to think

 you are better than you really are.  Use good sense and measure yourself by

 the amount of faith that God has given you.

~ Romans 12:3 (CEV)

It could very well be, then, that God has given me a measure of faith not the same as the mountain-movers and tree-uprooters.  And there isn’t anything wrong with that.  I’m not bad or evil because I have questions, either.  The thing is to acknowledge them, to look for answers, and to be okay when I’m not finding the sought-for answers.  (At least not yet.  Because I believe one day I’ll see the whole picture and it will make sense.)  My faith will only grow when I move out of my comfortable, having-answers zone, as I hope for and believe for those things that are not yet here in a tangible form.

So it was with thoughts like this in mind that I picked up the book O Me of Little Faith: True Confessions of a Spiritual Weakling by Jason Boyett.  I read it in the days after my mom’s heart surgery when I was filled with ‘what ifs’ and ‘if onlys’, and found a great deal of hope and comfort in reading of someone else’s struggles and questions as he tries to wrap his finite mind around an infinite God.  And I highlighted things like “Faith is . . . believing God will arrive, even if you can barely hear his song right now” and “Jesus doesn’t show up where he’s expected . . . He appears in places we hadn’t thought to look before” and held in my heart the encouragement to keep on keeping on even when my ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ are left hanging in the air.  Now Boyett doesn’t’ say “Hey, everyone!  Doubt!  You’ll be more spiritual!”  That would be crazy talk.  But he does write openly and honestly (with some very funny footnotes) about his own journey.  And through his honesty, I found an answer or two along with a great deal of hope for this journey we’re all on.

I have questions.  I don’t have all the answers.  And sometimes it feels as though the One who does have the answers is silent.  But I’m learning that’s okay.  It doesn’t mean I stop moving.  It means I light another candle of hope and keep moving towards the One who promises that while I may stumble and falter He will never lose His grip on me (Psalm 37:24).