The stress of faith

It pains us to live by faith because it is as stressful as any workplace in the modern world. It was perhaps not quite so bad in the early church but just as society stresses us so to does faith. The reason that faith and living ones faith stresses us in this day and age is that it means giving up more than just time and finance. This is what is so problematic for modern people when it comes to talking and living a faith. Even for the disciples listening to Christ in Luke (12.32-34) you can see that some of them would have been stressing.

Faith is not a walk in the park, if we are to be true to our calling by Christ to live in the world as Christ. We may think that because we have faith we just live our normal lives. Not true. Because we have faith we should be living extraordinary lives in comparison to those around us. Normality for us should be a disruption of everything that is contrary to God's purposes and to the life of Christ. Our agendas in the world should be agendas of love that disrupt the norm of society. We just need to be reminded how extraordinary the lives of those that lived by faith are. The writer to the Hebrews has a whole section on those who lived by faith including Abraham and Sarah (Heb 11). In living up to Christ we naturally disrupt the mores and norms of society.It is not just a question of being out there demonstrating or drawing attention to wrongs. It is an active living out of Christ in our very lives. It is a total surrendering of all that we know and love to answer God's call on our lives. Being prepared to sustain the tiredness of waiting and yet being ready at the same time, like living in the trenches.

We can only throw ourselves into the unknown to find God' already there

Isaiah's words from God are as true today as they were when he first uttered them (Is.1.15-16). We are so easily led away from our formation of community by our own ideas and paths. We think we are doing the right thing but we forget to question whether the actions we take are God's or our own tremulous wishes for the world. It does not matter what the situation might be we consistently fail ourselves by not asking whether what we do is something that God is striving for. We make assumptions as to what our good works should be, or what our worship service should be. Just like those who bore the brunt of Isaiah's complaints, we assume that what we do is what God wants. Those that live by faith live according to God's purposes not according to what the individual believes is right. This means that we often have to step into the future blindly following God's call and being assured that God will be there to meet us.

A journey of faith is embodied by taking the path that God wishes for us and not the path that we would wish for ourselves. We give ourselves over to fulfill God's presence in our lives. The path may well be obscured, we may well be told that what we are doing is stupid, daft, etc. I am sure that when Abram set of he was also thought to be an idiot going into the unknown without any clue as to what would occur. Guiterrez puts it well by quoting, Luis Espinal, a fellow South American priest murdered in Bolivia:

Train us, Lord, to fling ourselves upon the impossible, for behind the impossible is your grace and your presence; we cannot fall into emptiness.  The future is an enigma, our road is covered by mist, but we want to go on giving ourselves, because you continue hoping amid the night and weeping tears through a thousand human eyes. (On Job 91-92)

Only when we are able to fling ourselves into the future will we truly know God's presence there already meeting us with Christ's presence and love. Yes, life is full of stress but the life of faith is not stress free, for we are automatically going against the grain and what we believe to be good for ourselves.