The Craziness of Faith

 I realize people of Christian faith, people of other faith, and people of no particular faith, read this blog. And all are welcome here. Thing is, I sometimes ponder my own life of faith through an external-journalistic eye, and pronounce my own opinions of myself: Sarah, your faith is just crazy.

Even in my prayers, I express this directly to the God I believe is there: "Lord, is this just a fanatical, pie-in-the-sky sentimental thing that I do - praying to You? I sometimes feel crazy trusting You this much." Here I am, in those moments, asking God if He thinks I'm as crazy as I seem to think myself. Sometimes I trust God so wildly, so boldly, so almost-stupidly, that I think I'm more than a few cards short of a full-deck. And then I tell God what I think of my trusting Him so much - I analyze it and say, "There's a word for this in psychological terms: Magical thinking." 

Lately I've been trying to wrap my head around this concept: magical thinking. It's a psychology term that largely refers to what children in certain developmental stages do when they think they can control or manipulate outcomes by fantastical notions. A simple one is 'if you step in the crack you break your mother's back' which is ridiculous and even the most basically developed child will figure out soon enough is hogwash. But it shows up in adults who continue these trends by saying, 'If you forward this meme to 15 people you'll receive some random blessing.' This is the adult version of magical thinking.

But then we get to matters of faith. And prayer. And desperation. And hope. And despair. And belief. "There is a God in heaven, and He hears my prayer, so I will pray to Him and tell Him all I need. All I feel. All I think. In this moment and all the moments of my life to come," I tell myself. And in the telling I argue in my soul back to myself, "Isn't this a form of magical thinking? To think that you can manipulate God by prayers to do things for you?" And then I throw this challenge up to God in yet another move of crazy faith. 

It is my firm belief that if you are a parent, you must have faith, even if you don't know it or see it in yourself. I'm not saying what kind of faith that is. Or how each tenet or deeply held belief is formed in you. All I can say is, bearing children into the world, or being responsible for them, is a de facto supplier of anxiety, risk, fear, and never-ending worry. And the human soul cannot long bear under such burdens. And the courage required to walk with children through their developing life-stages demands an element of faith; unswerving trust that even with all our best efforts, a God of love showers them with blessing, protection, provision, more than we ever could. The birth of a child seems to birth faith in all of us. 

I have faced the most horrific experience I never wanted to face in the past 2 weeks. To protect my son, I cannot go into all the details here and now, but I can say I've walked through, and perhaps am still in, a season of shock, grief, and gratitude. To watch a child suffer is excruciating (I think of Mary, Jesus' mother frequently these days). The pain and extreme suffering I've witnessed these past two weeks has wrenched my stomach to where I almost puked numerous times. To see my child bear-up under serious injury challenges my own strength, when I might be about to crumble. To sit with a child who is confronted with his own seeming-impending death is not only shocking to the core, but is an invitation to even crazier faith - to open my eyes to see what I wasn't seeing before.

You see, we pray for our kids. It's a matter of fact, and matter of faith. Not because we believe prayer is a magical good-luck charm. Not because we believe God is going to smite us if we don't. Not because we are superstitious or plagued with magical thinking. We pray because we must, and because we believe God is actual, real, the very Great Creator of All things, including our children. We pray because we recognize our humanity, our frailty, how we are not the master of our own lives and fate, while at the same time embracing our responsibility to our own lives and fate. Even the most committed agnostic or atheist will pray, almost involuntarily, at the suffering of their child. 

Faith is not a crutch for those in distress. It is at the very core of the reality of our lives that hang by a thread, yet we think we build iron-clad fences around ourselves. No amount of healthy choices can forestall the inevitability of death. None of us can re-work the statistics that 100 out of every 100 people who have ever lived have died. Yet we'd like to deny this fact - this very uncomfortable fact, and pretend we can re-configure the numbers somehow. And when death stares my child in the face, and I see the reckoning playing out in real-time, if I were a person who cannot or will not pray,  I would , of all people, be most despairing.

And yet this is not the case for me. I watched my son strapped to a stretcher, minutes before being loaded onto a helicopter, turn his eyes to me and pleadingly ask, 'Will you pray for me right now?' A child who has never asked this of me - in his short 17 years of life. You can believe in that moment I was ready to exercise my crazy faith - faith that my feeble words in that moment would call on the power of the Almighty to watch over, protect, carry with angel-wings, this child whose broken body screamed for divine intervention.

I had asked God 2 weeks before, in a moment of need, when we were trying to pay Priscilla's college tuition bill, that had come to the final 3 hours before midnight and was due, 'Am I crazy to trust You this much, like this, for these practical needs? Do You think I'm nuts, Lord? Because sometimes I think I am." And God, in those final hours before the deadline showed us we had enough - within a couple hundred dollars to make this payment and not take on college debt (which is our aim in this season). From finances, to health, to protection, to healing, to wisdom, to relationships (strife, peace, discord, harmony), to disasters - all of these are borne by wings of faith and prayer to a very real God Whose delight is to hear, "Will you pray for me right now?" Because when our words falter, it is God Himself, by His Spirit, Who prays for us: "He intercedes for us with groanings to deep for words." So says Paul in Romans 8 - that epic chapter that is the heartbeat of the Christian Gospel.

When I am faithless, He remains faithful.

When I cannot pray, God Himself issues forth His Spirit to pray for me.

When my child is broken and pleading, God, a very real, very present, not-magical-thinking-superstitious God, is THERE. With him. Carrying him. 

You see, it isn't just a mystical entity I believe in. It is a God Who took on flesh and blood and made sure we could see Him. I do not pray to a God I only imagine, I pray to One Who bears wounds, whose suffering gives meaning to my own. This is why I can pray, why I can exercise crazy faith. Because the God I pray to is not a figment of my imagination. 

So yes, my faith, and maybe yours, is just a little bit crazy. I grant that. But God seems to be okay with that. So I guess I can be too.