Faith has been called a crutch for the weak, a coping mechanism for those not strong enough to deal with reality by those that have no idea what it is they are talking about, as if the believer is just someone who ignores the cruelties and sorrows of this present age, blithely saying it is not so, it cannot be so because they 'believe,' and pretending life is all sunshine and roses somehow makes it so. That isn't faith, it is either ignorance or an intentional perversion of reality bordering on neurosis.
Today I sit here, feeling as if I'm between the proverbial rock and a hard place: one an abusive past that erased any sense of family or childish innocence, and the other the inability to produce a family of my own, at least in a traditional sense. Worse, there are no comforters, no people in whom I can confide, that would understand without making senseless and often painful remarks because I suffer from two of the last social taboos. 'Mothers do not abuse their children, what are you smoking?' 'And infertility is no big deal, and even if it were, no one wants to hear about it, it might make them uncomfortable.'
So I sit here with my faith amidst my pain wondering where all that sunshine and those roses promised by the scoffers might be. My faith doesn't tell me that we'll be adopting anytime soon or ever. My faith doesn't say my emotional state will ever be normal and healthy, whatever that is. It doesn't bring back my lost childhood; it won't mend a shattered family; it won't fill the empty crib. So what is the use? Why hang on? What does it do?
It tells me there is sense beyond the illogicities of this present age, justice beyond all injustice, peace beyond all chaos, hope beyond despair, that light defeats the darkness, that there is purpose and meaning in this world, that there is joy beyond all the tears, rest beyond all the toil, that though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I go not alone, and that though I sit and cry, neither is my sorrow unseen. There are no easy answers, there are no simple explanations, but whatever betide, therein can I rest secure. All of my todays might not be happy or blessed, there will come fog and rain and snow, but Tomorrow will be far better than okay. Even amidst the disappointment and sorrow, healing will come, comfort is there, even be it more slowly than or in ways that I had not anticipated. That is faith. It is not simple. It is not easy. Nor is it for the faint of heart, for it is not a thing that is idle or passive, rather daily we are told to 'take up our cross and follow Me,' to intentionally pick up the implement of our own death and torture and walk a road whose end we do not know, but we do so in knowing the End is but the Beginning of things too marvelous for mortal minds to even begin to ponder.
G.K. Chesterton once said, "Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried." It is a complete surrender of all I think I am, all I think I want to be, but in losing what I think I want, I gain and become everything I should be, which is a better thing by far, and certainly very different than simply donning a pair of rose-tinted blinders.
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