Clay in the Hands

If you have tuned into any news source lately, you have been inundated with bad news.  From flooding rivers and loss of life to a shooting in a church in Charleston, we are faced with the reminder that we live in a fallen world.  In fact, if we are not cautious, we may even begin to question our foundation – our belief system.  We have to have a rational structure by which to process things.  When things don’t fit into our system, we are faced with a dilemma.  We must either alter the way we think about things or throw out our belief system all together.

This dilemma stretches our faith.  In fact, it actually forces us to assess where our faith is placed.  If our hope is founded on being able to rationally process all information that comes to us then our faith is not in God but rather our own ability to think – our intellect.

Some things defy reason.  As much as we desire to have the ability to put everything in a box, we can’t.  We need to have a faith bigger than our own understanding.  In fact, that is really the definition of faith – confidence in things we hope for and assurance in things we can’t see (Hebrews 11:1).

Thomas Merton gives us a wonderful perspective on understanding faith in New Seeds of Contemplation. He says:

Faith gives a dimension of simplicity and depth to all our apprehensions and to all our experience. What is this dimension of depth? It is the incorporation of the unknown and the unconscious into our daily life. Faith brings together the known and the unknown so that they overlap; or rather, so we are aware of their overlapping. Actually, our whole life is a mystery of which very little comes to our conscious understanding. But when we accept only what we can consciously rationalize, our life is actually reduced to the most pitiful limitations, though we may think quite otherwise.

What Merton is saying is that there is more to this existence than what we can see with our physical eyes. In fact, what we can understand from a human standpoint is but a fraction of real existence. Faith is an active acceptance of this fact.

So today, in the face of all the turmoil the world offers, remember that God is still on the throne.  Know that there is so much more going on than you can see and God is in control.

Take heart!

Have faith!