To Believe Or Not To Believe - That Is the Question

Faith in God is weird. At least it is for me.

I trust God absolutely with my life. My physical existence. Maybe that is because the night I offered it to Him, He gave it back to me. But I believe that what waits for us on "the other side" is pure love, and I trust that absolutely.

But when it comes to worldly affairs - look out!

Maybe that too comes from life experience. Look at all the times I have prayed for direction about my life or my career or work (when I was still young enough to have time to build a career) and have seen no answer. I have prayed until I was blue in the face, and I still saw no answer.

"Oh, when God closes one door He opens another," people tell me. The doors that have opened for me have come at crisis points, and they led to jobs that were not too rewarding financially and even less rewarding in other ways. All other doors have remained firmly closed.

So here I am now. Early sixties. Left an established job in an area with a fairly healthy economy to move home to an economically depressed area. Savings account is depleted. Unless a door opens soon, I face the certainty of cashing in the IRA I had just started a couple of years ago; it's my third try, and I promised myself it wouldn't get cashed in like the others had. I feel as though someone has tied me to the railroad tracks and I can hear the train approaching the curve. There isn't anyone to untie me, and the train crew won't be able to stop in time.

Can I trust God now? If it actually were my physical life, I think I could. But this is quality of life. How you exist. Can I have a job that is more rewarding than the others? Can I earn enough to at least get out of debt and hopefully put a little by for retirement? If I can in fact afford to retire at all?

And what it boils down to is this question: Have I been following the wonderful Being I met one night as I lay in a hospital bed? Or not? That is the worst of it. I've led myself down the garden path before. Have I just done it again?

I acknowledged this morning, quite tearfully, that I am scared to death here. Maybe I just needed to say it aloud; both God and I know the truth of it, but it just needed to be confessed aloud.

It brings me back to the story of Peter trying to walk on the surface of a stormy sea to go to Jesus. As long as he kept his attention on Jesus, he was all right. When the reality of what he was doing got through to him, he grew afraid and began to sink. Jesus, of course, was there to pull him out.

Do I believe that actually happened? I don't know. I tend to think it is a story that makes a point: When you are in stormy seas, you can come through it unharmed if you keep your eyes on your Source. I am trying to do that.

There has to be a line between "keeping your eyes on your Source" and "not being realistic." I am not always certain where that line is. No, I am rarely certain.

Right now this is what I am certain of: I am in my early sixties, and I am still here. I have survived many crises - physical illnesses, financial difficulties, disappointments that sent me into big-time darkness. I will come through this somehow. (I wish I knew how! It would help.) Some day I will look back at this and say, "I really don't know to this day how I got through that." Just like all those other times.

And I attritube my continued survival to the God before Whom I wept this morning.

Yep, faith in God is weird. At least it is for me.