_____________________________________________________________
As Jesus went on from there, two blind men followed him, calling out, "Have mercy on us, Son of David!"
When he had gone indoors, the blind men came to him, and he asked them, "Do you believe that I am able to do this?"
"Yes, Lord," they replied.
Then he touched their eyes and said, "According to your faith will it be done to you"; and their sight was restored.
................Matthew 9:27-30 (NIV)
_____________________________________________________________
Our purpose is to resolve with other. Our ultimate purpose is to resolve with the Ultimate Other.
The beauty and wonder of our relationship to God is that we can either pursue or deny our source, and in that decision lies the value of our resolution. We choose to believe in, pursue and love God or we choose to deny or hate Him, to fight against Him, to ignore Him, to disbelieve in Him. It is up to us; no one is forced into a relationship with God.
What kind of love is forced? No love at all.
What kind of love decision is “fixed”? What kind of love relationship is based on bondage against one's will? Can “sinners” cowering in the hands of an angry god really love such a being? How can you claim that God's love is unconditional (John 3:16-17) and then turn around and add a bunch of conditions to it? Because your relationship with God is based on the exercise of your choice to love or not, it is of incalculable value, for love freely, thoughtfully, willingly, joyfully given is more valuable than anything else in all of creation. Just ask a child. God has done so with His gift to us on the cross, and we can do so back to God with our commitment, love and faith back to Him.
Think about that. You have all the freedom in the universe, in Eternity, to choose your own destiny-—in this life and the next. What kind of God would give that kind of power and responsibility to His creation? It is this decision about our design that tells us something about the designer. God understands love. But before we think about the Ultimate Other, we need to discuss a vital link, the piece of the network that makes access to God possible – faith.
Of known and hoped for
Without faith we are no different than dung beetles-—forgetful of yesterday, feeding today, oblivious of tomorrow. It is faith, not culture that allows us to travel time, it is how we tie together the past, the present and the future, and how we function within the matrix of decisions that shape our eternity. We record and try to learn from our past, we struggle in the face of the present, we try to change the future, all within the context of the hope of better, if not at least different things. The believer has faith that the sins of yesterday are forgiven today so there will be peace and joy tomorrow. The atheist has faith in the ashes, that the sun rose yesterday, will rise today and will rise again tomorrow. The scientist has faith in what is proven with the aim of understanding and proving more. We all, in one way or another, have faith in the culture that shaped us, in the belief that there is some kind of logic or reason to the experiences we are living out, and that these are reasonably repeatable and reliable. In other words, the belief systems for all people are a blend of known and hoped for. It is this catalytic quality that binds us together, fusing past, present and future self with past, present and future other.
Uplink
Using our computer analogy again, the hardware that makes the Internet possible is not the millions of miles of cable, the radio waves filling the air around us, the millions of servers or even any of the quadrillions of lines of code running on them. The Internet exists thanks to a thing called a NIC, or a network interface card. Every computer on the Internet has one, either wired or wireless. This is a card, or sometimes a hardware feature built directly into the motherboard, that has the sole purpose of communicating with the outside world. Like all hardware, a NIC operates using drivers. A driver is a bit of software that tells an OS how to use a piece of hardware, and tells the hardware how to deal with the OS. Without the driver, the hardware is useless. Without a NIC driver, the NIC cannot see or hear or know anything about the Internet outside. Without a functional NIC, a computer can know nothing about the Internet that it cannot access.
In us, the NIC is faith. We have faith in many things, our spouse, our children, our government, our church... God. Without faith there is no interaction with any of these, there is only self. But how does faith work? What are the drivers of faith? When I was an angry, confused teenager I often talked with my friends about faith. The definitions I got were pretty flimsy – it's just belief, either you believe or you don't; it's a feeling you can't really describe. “That doesn't sound like faith,” I would say, “it sounds like the result of faith. That's like defining blue by saying it is blue. So what is this faith thing?” Until only a few years ago the concept completely baffled me, and the answers I found varied wildly.
One Sunday in church we sang a very, very old hymn that started to make this faith thing a little more clear...
Faith operates at all levels of our make-up in different ways, and the combined force of belief, trust, obedience and desire make up the totality of what we call faith. Just as every person is made up of different but interdependent parts, each part plays a critical role in the totality of Self. It is the same with faith. Also, faith is a mixture of thought and action, not merely thought and not merely action. We can believe a thing, but if we do not act related to those beliefs the belief is neutralized. Same with trust. I can say I trust my wife, but if I don't act on that trust I am actually living out the fact that I don't trust her.
The table below breaks faith down into its core elements. Each element of faith corresponds to one of our human core elements.
How is faith developed? In what ways is this thing a part of every human being, and how is faith manifested in every person and culture?
Every person within a family or a community is exposed to local views as to the nature of the world, whether this view is scientific or spiritual, financial or romantic, and this information becomes the basis of one's intellectual belief system. It starts early with learning language, communicating wants and needs and understanding how the outside world responds (or doesn’t). Because the start is so early, the other two spheres are also involved, emotion and strength. Children learn how to operate in their world, learning how to get fed, how to be emotionally nourished, cause and effect. The parents and larger community reinforce these systems, building in the child a set of structures on which he can rely to survive in the world. But with this acculturation comes baggage. As a race we often pass down things that are better left in the past, or worse, lose so much of their original context that they become baffling weights hanging around our necks.
At some point in every human life this mix of the components solidifies into one’s faith. The things we learn from our parents and peers, our lovers and enemies, our culture and history, jells into a solid, like an epoxy that hardens only when mixed with the solidifying agent that turns it from sticky goo into a crystalline gem. This is natural, but once this hardening occurs it is nearly impossible to break or change the faith. This is why you can have whole cultures that are corrupt, destructive and diseased, because the twisted beliefs and traditions that are destructive and divisive are the very foundation of their faith, and how they interact with the world. Within their crystalline faith are the ugly, dark streaks of opinion, custom, taste and bias.
You are probably thinking that this spin on faith sounds more like world view or "culture" than the traditional spin on faith (in its simplest sense one's belief (or not) in God). Consider this definition, though.
Faith is obedience driven by belief, hope and desire
Like our other faculties, faith must be exercised and strengthened over time. Ultimately you want to have a healthy balance between the elements, but getting there can sometimes be a trick. Having too much focus on any one of the elements can lead to a stilted and dysfunctional faith, not only in God but anything.
Ask an Atheist if she has faith, and she will tell you, “Yes, I put my faith in humanity, or science, (or pizza or tennis or whatever), anything but God.” An Atheist will never tell you that faith itself does not exist, rather that it's a matter of focus. Every human has the capacity for faith, for faith draws on and binds together the very core elements from which we are made. We have a mind so we can understand, and through that understanding believe the things we know. We have emotion so we can engage that which we understand (or not) passionately, with fire or with ice. We have strength so that we can act on (or choose not to act on) our beliefs and our passions. All of this culminates within our Soul, our Spirit, the desire to reach beyond our mere self to touch others, to touch God. Everyone has this-—it is our design. Faith is the essence of our humanity.
From Another Point of View
Ever wonder why we have been allowed to continue on as we are, with wars, violence, lust, greed, avarice, you name it? God does not destroy humanity in the face of our disgrace because He has faith in us. In the same way that we who believe place our hope in seeing Him someday, He also hopes to see us someday as well. Because He loves us, we are worth loving. Because we are worth loving, He loves us. If we look at it this way, we see that the question is not entirely, Do you believe in God? Do you trust God? Do you obey God? Do you desire God? The question is also, does God believe in you? Does God trust you? Does God obey you? Does God desire you?
The main challenge with faith is that it must never be the same. It must grow. If your faith is the same as it was 10 years ago, then you have become stagnant. A healthy faith is one that evolves, matures. If you do not actively work on exercising your faith, you will become weak and ineffective, or worse, when faced with real trials and hardships you will collapse and be left with the shattered remnants of a jaded, worthless faith.
Study strengthens the belief system of your faith, and this evolves over time into wisdom. We change over time, and often passages read as a teenager will have significantly different meaning when re-examined later in life. Someone told me once of a great scientist who read the entire Bible when he was twelve and decided it was silly rubbish. He abandoned his family’s faith in Christianity and embarked on a journey of scientific study that lasted 90 years. I suppose I was supposed to be impressed that a 12 year old would read the entire Bible and make such a decision, but what does a 12 year old know of such things, even a very bright one? I asked if he ever read it again-—he hadn’t that anyone knew of. How would he have viewed the Bible differently if he had been open minded enough to have bothered to read it again from the vantage of a life long lived? Would he have found wisdom in the book? Sad that such an intelligent old man would leave his eternal fate in the hands of a 12 year old boy.
Hope is a different kind of beast than study. How does one exercise hope? Trust. But it is hard to trust in this world. How many people in the world who are hopeless, or beyond that, cynical. Instead of looking to the future with any confidence or anticipation or expectation, they look to the future and see nothing but a black wall, the yawning pit of death and despair. What a bummer. Granted, some people’s lives are awful, and maintaining hope in the face of some of the atrocities heaped on them by their families, neighbors, strangers and the government can blacken the most expectant heart. But isn’t it interesting that there are so many people who do have hope in the face of atrocity? Isn’t it amazing that people do sing hymns as bombs fall around them? Many years ago I was reading a magazine that had an article about a little girl who was buried by rubble after an earthquake in Mexico. The whole town rushed to save here, digging her out of the rubble, only to find that she was so badly pinned down in the freezing well water that moving her would kill her instantly. There was a close-up picture of the little girl’s face as she looked up from the water at the camera man. The whites of her eyes were completely red as the blood vessels burst from the trauma; her face was pail, her hair slicked with water and filth. The caption read that her family was with her, holding her hands and comforting her up until she died. It was heart-breaking. Later a friend told me that she knew of this tragedy, and that the news magazine left out an important fact. The little girl, her family and the town’s people were singing hymns to keep her calm and reassured while they tried to dig her out. Her mother prayed with her, and the two of them sang quietly together while the men dug. And when the little girl died, she died singing. Yes, there is horror in the world, but it is the innate faculty of hope within the human spirit, a gift from God Himself, that makes us different.
Without wisdom and understanding in what we believe, without expectant hope in the meaning of our existence in the face of brutal nature, we are incapable of controlling ourselves, our bodies, our desires, our destiny. Unlike the other elements, the body is very much tied into the mechanics of the universe. Our bodies want to mate, to eat, to sleep, to defecate, and all of these functions are less under our control than, for instance, what we learn from our culture. It doesn’t matter what culture I am in, after a certain period of time and effort my body needs to sleep. Restraint of the physical beast is something that nearly every culture spends a lot of time working on. A human without knowledge and without hope succumbs to the forces of desire, both physically and spiritually, and can become a fanatical, ravenous, destroyer. Humans are terribly dangerous creatures.
Soul is the fuel that burns it all together, and so the Spirit is action, and in a mature Soul this action is restraint and obedience. The soul is an eternal thing, it will never stop growing and maturing. The trials and pain we suffer in this world refine it, purify it. Spirit directed towards God is powerful, unstoppable. But spirit directed towards self or other that is not God can become incredibly powerful and dangerous. All of the force poured into us from eternity can become misdirected, misguided, and all of the desire to resolve with God can become twisted towards motivations that never resolve. This desire to resolve is like a hunger, and if it is fed the wrong thing it becomes more ravenous, seeking gratification like an addict forever looks for the next fix, forever unsatisfied. When we are well fed with communion with God the spirit is filled with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. These are the fruits of the spirit found in Galatians 5:22-23, and they come from a Spirit that is satisfied and full of rest. The spirit that is not well fed looks to other things to gratify its ravenous nature: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies (Galatians 5:19-21). It is by these outward actions that you can diagnose the inward condition of one's Spirit.
A Spirit can be driven by the endless need for gratification or it can be satisfied by resolution. Gratification is a means, it is indulgence and pleasure, the pleasing of tastes and appetites, but no matter how you feed the body, tomorrow it will need more--no matter how you are gratified by cavier and lobster, it is fleeting and you will grow hungry again. Satisfaction is an end, a destination, a solution, full-filling fulfillment, eating and drinking and never thirsting or hungering again. In this respect, gratification and satisfaction are mutually exclusive, the Spirit can’t pursue both. So the ultimate question of faith is this--does the thing in which you place your faith gratify, or does it satisfy?
As Jesus went on from there, two blind men followed him, calling out, "Have mercy on us, Son of David!"
When he had gone indoors, the blind men came to him, and he asked them, "Do you believe that I am able to do this?"
"Yes, Lord," they replied.
Then he touched their eyes and said, "According to your faith will it be done to you"; and their sight was restored.
................Matthew 9:27-30 (NIV)
_____________________________________________________________
| The long and short of it.... Faith is less esoteric than you would think. Faith is obedience driven by beliefs, hopes and desires. By looking at the nature of a person's action you can see the object of their faith. There are many things in which you can place your faith-—yourself, the love of your life, wealth, your children, your culture, science, idols-—the list is endless. But faith cannot truly resolve unless it is placed in the thing that quenches all desire, that answers all questions, that resonates with joy, that satisfies all hunger-—The Ultimate Other, God Himself. |
Our purpose is to resolve with other. Our ultimate purpose is to resolve with the Ultimate Other.
The beauty and wonder of our relationship to God is that we can either pursue or deny our source, and in that decision lies the value of our resolution. We choose to believe in, pursue and love God or we choose to deny or hate Him, to fight against Him, to ignore Him, to disbelieve in Him. It is up to us; no one is forced into a relationship with God.
What kind of love is forced? No love at all.
What kind of love decision is “fixed”? What kind of love relationship is based on bondage against one's will? Can “sinners” cowering in the hands of an angry god really love such a being? How can you claim that God's love is unconditional (John 3:16-17) and then turn around and add a bunch of conditions to it? Because your relationship with God is based on the exercise of your choice to love or not, it is of incalculable value, for love freely, thoughtfully, willingly, joyfully given is more valuable than anything else in all of creation. Just ask a child. God has done so with His gift to us on the cross, and we can do so back to God with our commitment, love and faith back to Him.
Think about that. You have all the freedom in the universe, in Eternity, to choose your own destiny-—in this life and the next. What kind of God would give that kind of power and responsibility to His creation? It is this decision about our design that tells us something about the designer. God understands love. But before we think about the Ultimate Other, we need to discuss a vital link, the piece of the network that makes access to God possible – faith.
Of known and hoped for
Without faith we are no different than dung beetles-—forgetful of yesterday, feeding today, oblivious of tomorrow. It is faith, not culture that allows us to travel time, it is how we tie together the past, the present and the future, and how we function within the matrix of decisions that shape our eternity. We record and try to learn from our past, we struggle in the face of the present, we try to change the future, all within the context of the hope of better, if not at least different things. The believer has faith that the sins of yesterday are forgiven today so there will be peace and joy tomorrow. The atheist has faith in the ashes, that the sun rose yesterday, will rise today and will rise again tomorrow. The scientist has faith in what is proven with the aim of understanding and proving more. We all, in one way or another, have faith in the culture that shaped us, in the belief that there is some kind of logic or reason to the experiences we are living out, and that these are reasonably repeatable and reliable. In other words, the belief systems for all people are a blend of known and hoped for. It is this catalytic quality that binds us together, fusing past, present and future self with past, present and future other.
Uplink
Using our computer analogy again, the hardware that makes the Internet possible is not the millions of miles of cable, the radio waves filling the air around us, the millions of servers or even any of the quadrillions of lines of code running on them. The Internet exists thanks to a thing called a NIC, or a network interface card. Every computer on the Internet has one, either wired or wireless. This is a card, or sometimes a hardware feature built directly into the motherboard, that has the sole purpose of communicating with the outside world. Like all hardware, a NIC operates using drivers. A driver is a bit of software that tells an OS how to use a piece of hardware, and tells the hardware how to deal with the OS. Without the driver, the hardware is useless. Without a NIC driver, the NIC cannot see or hear or know anything about the Internet outside. Without a functional NIC, a computer can know nothing about the Internet that it cannot access.
In us, the NIC is faith. We have faith in many things, our spouse, our children, our government, our church... God. Without faith there is no interaction with any of these, there is only self. But how does faith work? What are the drivers of faith? When I was an angry, confused teenager I often talked with my friends about faith. The definitions I got were pretty flimsy – it's just belief, either you believe or you don't; it's a feeling you can't really describe. “That doesn't sound like faith,” I would say, “it sounds like the result of faith. That's like defining blue by saying it is blue. So what is this faith thing?” Until only a few years ago the concept completely baffled me, and the answers I found varied wildly.
One Sunday in church we sang a very, very old hymn that started to make this faith thing a little more clear...
- Trust and obey, for there's no other way To be happy with Jesus, But to trust and obey.
Faith operates at all levels of our make-up in different ways, and the combined force of belief, trust, obedience and desire make up the totality of what we call faith. Just as every person is made up of different but interdependent parts, each part plays a critical role in the totality of Self. It is the same with faith. Also, faith is a mixture of thought and action, not merely thought and not merely action. We can believe a thing, but if we do not act related to those beliefs the belief is neutralized. Same with trust. I can say I trust my wife, but if I don't act on that trust I am actually living out the fact that I don't trust her.The table below breaks faith down into its core elements. Each element of faith corresponds to one of our human core elements.
- Faith as obedience is expressed through the body as restraint, nourished by our care for others, wasted away by dominance and control.
- Faith as belief is expressed through the mind as wisdom, cultivated by study, hindered by prejudice and ignorance.
- Faith as trust is expressed through the heart as hope, augmented by expectation, diminished by cynicism.
- Faith as desire is expressed through the soul as longing, strengthened by the outward seeking of Other, weakened and diseased by the inward obsession with self.
How is faith developed? In what ways is this thing a part of every human being, and how is faith manifested in every person and culture?
Every person within a family or a community is exposed to local views as to the nature of the world, whether this view is scientific or spiritual, financial or romantic, and this information becomes the basis of one's intellectual belief system. It starts early with learning language, communicating wants and needs and understanding how the outside world responds (or doesn’t). Because the start is so early, the other two spheres are also involved, emotion and strength. Children learn how to operate in their world, learning how to get fed, how to be emotionally nourished, cause and effect. The parents and larger community reinforce these systems, building in the child a set of structures on which he can rely to survive in the world. But with this acculturation comes baggage. As a race we often pass down things that are better left in the past, or worse, lose so much of their original context that they become baffling weights hanging around our necks.
At some point in every human life this mix of the components solidifies into one’s faith. The things we learn from our parents and peers, our lovers and enemies, our culture and history, jells into a solid, like an epoxy that hardens only when mixed with the solidifying agent that turns it from sticky goo into a crystalline gem. This is natural, but once this hardening occurs it is nearly impossible to break or change the faith. This is why you can have whole cultures that are corrupt, destructive and diseased, because the twisted beliefs and traditions that are destructive and divisive are the very foundation of their faith, and how they interact with the world. Within their crystalline faith are the ugly, dark streaks of opinion, custom, taste and bias.
You are probably thinking that this spin on faith sounds more like world view or "culture" than the traditional spin on faith (in its simplest sense one's belief (or not) in God). Consider this definition, though.
Faith is obedience driven by belief, hope and desire
- When a man pursues a woman he is acting out his role as a suitor (based on beliefs, culture, learning, etc.) to fulfill his hope that she will desire him as he desires her, and in doing so their relationship will resolve (girlfriend, fiancé, wife).
- When a scientist experiments in the laboratory she is acting out the methods of scientific inquiry to fulfill the hope that she will solve or better understand the problem or project on which she is working.
- When a business man builds a company he is applying his knowledge of the market to fulfill his hope that the money he is investing in the business will make him wealthy.
- When the blind men heard that Jesus Christ was walking by, they stepped into the crowd and called out for mercy and healing to fulfill their desire to see, to be whole.
Like our other faculties, faith must be exercised and strengthened over time. Ultimately you want to have a healthy balance between the elements, but getting there can sometimes be a trick. Having too much focus on any one of the elements can lead to a stilted and dysfunctional faith, not only in God but anything.
Ask an Atheist if she has faith, and she will tell you, “Yes, I put my faith in humanity, or science, (or pizza or tennis or whatever), anything but God.” An Atheist will never tell you that faith itself does not exist, rather that it's a matter of focus. Every human has the capacity for faith, for faith draws on and binds together the very core elements from which we are made. We have a mind so we can understand, and through that understanding believe the things we know. We have emotion so we can engage that which we understand (or not) passionately, with fire or with ice. We have strength so that we can act on (or choose not to act on) our beliefs and our passions. All of this culminates within our Soul, our Spirit, the desire to reach beyond our mere self to touch others, to touch God. Everyone has this-—it is our design. Faith is the essence of our humanity.
From Another Point of View
Ever wonder why we have been allowed to continue on as we are, with wars, violence, lust, greed, avarice, you name it? God does not destroy humanity in the face of our disgrace because He has faith in us. In the same way that we who believe place our hope in seeing Him someday, He also hopes to see us someday as well. Because He loves us, we are worth loving. Because we are worth loving, He loves us. If we look at it this way, we see that the question is not entirely, Do you believe in God? Do you trust God? Do you obey God? Do you desire God? The question is also, does God believe in you? Does God trust you? Does God obey you? Does God desire you?
- Does God desire us? More than anything. Jesus Christ's sacrifice for us on the cross shows that God very much does desire us. In dealing with our separation and fallen-ness God had choices-—wipe everything out and start over, walk away and abandon us, solve this problem for us. He chose the last solution, to become a human incarnate and die a brutal death to clear the path so we can return home. He chose the later because we matter.
- Does God believe in us? The most interesting thing about turning this paradigm around is seeing how differently the question feels from God's point of view. For us it's a matter of believing in what is not immediately visible. For God it is believing in what is not immediately valuable. For us it is a matter of making an intellectual leap beyond grasping only what is tangible (definable, repeatable, controllable) in the present and chasing the possible in the eternal. God is in the past, the present and in the eternal, so from His point of view He knows us better than we know ourselves. God knows every moment of your life, every thought, every desire, and He waits patiently for you to come to maturity. If He did not believe in you there would be no promise that “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son that whomever shall believe in Him shall have eternal life.” If God didn’t believe in you, would He make such a sacrifice and promise?
- Does God trust us? More than I (personally) am comfortable with, actually. Any parent who teaches a child to do something inherently dangerous (but necessary and easy once mastered, say like riding a bike) knows that the key ingredient to growth is trusting that your child can ultimately do it. All of my daughters took some nasty falls when they learned to ride, but we trusted that they could do it. We trusted that they could tolerate the pain to make the strides forward. Part of the reason we suffer is that we are learning, and usually it is only through getting a little singed can we learn how to light a fire. God trusts that we can handle that, and that we can do it.
- Does Good obey us? Not directly, but He does choose to respond to us. There are some believers out there who act like God is their personal genie, granting health, wealth and prosperity on those righteous few who follow the game plan (e.g. law) to the letter or maintain a positive attitude. But God does not use His strength the same way we use ours. We are fundamentally powerless becoming powerful, and therefore need direction from the more powerful and mature to learn restraint, to avoid self-destruction or destroying others with our increasing power. God, on the other hand, is all-powerful. He only obeys himself (He even swore by Himself in the Bible). For God, the use of strength on our behalf is not His obedience to our demands (some people believe that God HAS to fulfill certain obligations when they act out rituals spelled out in the Bible), but rather a combination of His gifts of grace balanced with restraint in dealing with us as we really deserve.
The main challenge with faith is that it must never be the same. It must grow. If your faith is the same as it was 10 years ago, then you have become stagnant. A healthy faith is one that evolves, matures. If you do not actively work on exercising your faith, you will become weak and ineffective, or worse, when faced with real trials and hardships you will collapse and be left with the shattered remnants of a jaded, worthless faith.
Study strengthens the belief system of your faith, and this evolves over time into wisdom. We change over time, and often passages read as a teenager will have significantly different meaning when re-examined later in life. Someone told me once of a great scientist who read the entire Bible when he was twelve and decided it was silly rubbish. He abandoned his family’s faith in Christianity and embarked on a journey of scientific study that lasted 90 years. I suppose I was supposed to be impressed that a 12 year old would read the entire Bible and make such a decision, but what does a 12 year old know of such things, even a very bright one? I asked if he ever read it again-—he hadn’t that anyone knew of. How would he have viewed the Bible differently if he had been open minded enough to have bothered to read it again from the vantage of a life long lived? Would he have found wisdom in the book? Sad that such an intelligent old man would leave his eternal fate in the hands of a 12 year old boy.
Hope is a different kind of beast than study. How does one exercise hope? Trust. But it is hard to trust in this world. How many people in the world who are hopeless, or beyond that, cynical. Instead of looking to the future with any confidence or anticipation or expectation, they look to the future and see nothing but a black wall, the yawning pit of death and despair. What a bummer. Granted, some people’s lives are awful, and maintaining hope in the face of some of the atrocities heaped on them by their families, neighbors, strangers and the government can blacken the most expectant heart. But isn’t it interesting that there are so many people who do have hope in the face of atrocity? Isn’t it amazing that people do sing hymns as bombs fall around them? Many years ago I was reading a magazine that had an article about a little girl who was buried by rubble after an earthquake in Mexico. The whole town rushed to save here, digging her out of the rubble, only to find that she was so badly pinned down in the freezing well water that moving her would kill her instantly. There was a close-up picture of the little girl’s face as she looked up from the water at the camera man. The whites of her eyes were completely red as the blood vessels burst from the trauma; her face was pail, her hair slicked with water and filth. The caption read that her family was with her, holding her hands and comforting her up until she died. It was heart-breaking. Later a friend told me that she knew of this tragedy, and that the news magazine left out an important fact. The little girl, her family and the town’s people were singing hymns to keep her calm and reassured while they tried to dig her out. Her mother prayed with her, and the two of them sang quietly together while the men dug. And when the little girl died, she died singing. Yes, there is horror in the world, but it is the innate faculty of hope within the human spirit, a gift from God Himself, that makes us different.
Without wisdom and understanding in what we believe, without expectant hope in the meaning of our existence in the face of brutal nature, we are incapable of controlling ourselves, our bodies, our desires, our destiny. Unlike the other elements, the body is very much tied into the mechanics of the universe. Our bodies want to mate, to eat, to sleep, to defecate, and all of these functions are less under our control than, for instance, what we learn from our culture. It doesn’t matter what culture I am in, after a certain period of time and effort my body needs to sleep. Restraint of the physical beast is something that nearly every culture spends a lot of time working on. A human without knowledge and without hope succumbs to the forces of desire, both physically and spiritually, and can become a fanatical, ravenous, destroyer. Humans are terribly dangerous creatures.
Soul is the fuel that burns it all together, and so the Spirit is action, and in a mature Soul this action is restraint and obedience. The soul is an eternal thing, it will never stop growing and maturing. The trials and pain we suffer in this world refine it, purify it. Spirit directed towards God is powerful, unstoppable. But spirit directed towards self or other that is not God can become incredibly powerful and dangerous. All of the force poured into us from eternity can become misdirected, misguided, and all of the desire to resolve with God can become twisted towards motivations that never resolve. This desire to resolve is like a hunger, and if it is fed the wrong thing it becomes more ravenous, seeking gratification like an addict forever looks for the next fix, forever unsatisfied. When we are well fed with communion with God the spirit is filled with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. These are the fruits of the spirit found in Galatians 5:22-23, and they come from a Spirit that is satisfied and full of rest. The spirit that is not well fed looks to other things to gratify its ravenous nature: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies (Galatians 5:19-21). It is by these outward actions that you can diagnose the inward condition of one's Spirit.
A Spirit can be driven by the endless need for gratification or it can be satisfied by resolution. Gratification is a means, it is indulgence and pleasure, the pleasing of tastes and appetites, but no matter how you feed the body, tomorrow it will need more--no matter how you are gratified by cavier and lobster, it is fleeting and you will grow hungry again. Satisfaction is an end, a destination, a solution, full-filling fulfillment, eating and drinking and never thirsting or hungering again. In this respect, gratification and satisfaction are mutually exclusive, the Spirit can’t pursue both. So the ultimate question of faith is this--does the thing in which you place your faith gratify, or does it satisfy?
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