My Broken Faith

Disclaimers up front:

This is a very personal post about how my faith has evolved over the course of our experiences with my daughter and the community she opened our eyes to.  It is by no means an indication that I am done refining these thoughts.  Imperfectness abounds in the paragraphs ahead, but no matter how personal it is I am never opposed to open discussion, it's the very thing that has gotten me this far.

4 years

For four years now I have tried to write this post.  The problem is every time I would finish pages of monologue only to realize I veered off into a place that made the weeds look welcoming.  I would be unsatisfied with my theology, abandon the whole thing, consult my closest faith mentors, and start from square one.  So here we are, touching the page again, in hopes this version actually makes it out.  My intent is to write this as an autobiographical account of the last four years, what they have shown me, and how they have forever changed me.  All in hopes to inspire similar self-reflection in others.

On the surface to those who know us and our story it all fits together snugly and above all, comfortably:  Married couple wants kids, married couple struggles to have kids, thoughts and prayers for couple, miraculously infertile married couple conceives, child given rare diagnoses but couple leans into faith, more thoughts and prayers for couple, child is a rock star overcoming odds and even gets a neuro-typical rating of development, hooray for couple.  God is good, tell the world!

But what about when the pieces never fit?  What if when we tell the world we actually push people away from God?

You see, in our journey we've found that many times in our situation, the pieces don't fit.  The pieces are completely incompatible with each other.  Moms, dads, parents find themselves in situations watching their child struggle to breathe.  They find themselves watching their child suffer hundreds of painful seizures a day and they're forced into a nightmare conflict of guilt and unimaginable pain when their child slips out of this life.  Loss, heartache, but deep down they are glad that their child is no longer in pain.  How can my experience and faith possibly answer the questions in that darkest hour?  In short, it couldn't in the form I had been living it out.

I am treading on sensitive ground.  I get that, but this is the place from which I have toiled over almost every day for the past four years.  How do I praise God for my daughter without turning a blind eye to all the pain of all the families we've met.  Is it even possible to feel comfortable claiming "God is good, all in His timing.  He has a plan." as a direct response to our favorable situation while acknowledging the families who are left with literal ashes?  Families who hear "God has a plan." and become physically ill because that phrase simply doesn't make sense in their life.  It is in that moment that one of two things are likely to happen: They will look for a gospel based explanation from Christ followers around them, or they will leave their faith all together.  Furthermore, if the Christ followers they find can only offer them catch phrases like "sometimes things happen that we just can't explain but God is always in control" they will drive even faster towards the latter, because what good is omnipotence if the wielder of it would intervene for one family but not another?  No, the most alienating answer we can give someone living in a darkness most of us can't relate is "we just don't know the whole picture".  That pains me because I myself used to apply this phrase as liberally as sunscreen at the beach.  It's an answer that is meant for comfort but received with overwhelming feelings of abandonment not just by the one who spoke it but by God. 

This is the cornerstone from where I had to rebuild my faith.  Becoming aware did not make me believe in my God any less, but it did make me question the faith I was exercising and I needed to reconcile that.

The type of Christianity we live our lives with matters

It has now become clear to me there are two major doctrines of Christianity lived out in America.  Gospel based Christianity and a self-help-Christianity.  It is this second form that creates these expectations that prayer and God's providence will bring about a positive result or at least acceptable resolution for the prayerful.  If something is not the outcome we had hoped for we build a sense of peace that we must have misjudged the end of the storm.  Through that storm things will work out in hindsight, if we just keep praying and stay calm.  If we're met with more tragedy we push on because one day it will finally go our way and those trials will all make sense.  If we're being completely honest most of us have enough at our disposal that the odds are usually always in our favor for things to work out eventually.  In doing this we've failed to realize that what we've actually done is placed a high stakes wager in God's name.  We've created a false idol out of God.  We've desired God because we've desired comfort, resolution, and answers we've already been given.  Paul makes clear in his letters that the world is broken, we've been given plenty of reasons to walk hand in hand with our neighbors, comfort is not for this world, and the only resolution we need be concerned with took place on the cross 2000 years ago.

Put another way, when we begin to leverage God as a means for calm amidst tragedy, we've misrepresented Christ.  Make no mistake there is peace and calm to be found in our faith walks, but it is never guaranteed nor is it meant to be our focus.  The danger is a faith that spends more time affirming its identity and existence through the storm than it does affirming its identity by how it treats women, children, and neighbors of any race, creed or nationality.  We make it a faith about us and how it improves our lives and not how to use our faith for those around us.  When we spend all our effort keeping ourselves calm amidst trials with the hope that one day it will all work out we naturally want to shout to the world that we've been delivered of our storm.

But how is this declaration going to affect someone who's boat never made it out of the water, who lost everything and swam to shore alone?

When we look to find God in our circumstances (good or bad) we over complicate the relationship and worse, we give a false expectation for why others should or should not follow him.  God is very much in all of our circumstances, but rather than a vision of intentionally pulling strings one way or another as a response to our petitions, he is present.  He is with you when you hurt and he is with you when you are overjoyed.  Through Christ and the word becoming flesh he has personally felt every single thing you're feeling.  He is a partner who loves the deepest, not a puppet master.  He knows the whole story, every struggle, every celebration and everything yet to come, start to finish.  It doesn't mean he favors or punishes, this life is broken.  We're asked to pray as a means of connection and deepening a relationship.  Prayers for strength in attributes he represents, not outcomes we desire or understand.  Suffering is a natural part of a fallen world, plain and simple, this is outlined in great effort all throughout the Bible.  It's when we let go of the expectation that God needs to be identified as anything more than "present" in all our circumstances, good or bad, that we can truly move on to all that the Bible has laid out for us.

It is by accepting this ever slight twist of perspective that I have been able to truly dig into my faith.  It is by moving past labels of "blessings" for good fortunes that I have been able to love radically and care passionately for and gain more of an empathetic response towards "the least of these".

When we build our faith based on a culmination of positive outcomes in our lives as evidence of God's goodness we irreparably alienate the very same people we will later beat over the head with a Bible for walking away from God.  Aye, but when we exercise a faith that is built on God's word, rather than our desire to find comfort or affirmation in all circumstances we become set free and able to share the frustrations and weep along side of the parents who lost it all, those suffering injustice, the oppressed.  We are set free to do everything we can to love on them and try to affect good in their lives.  We cease to project a faith that forces someone into a corner where they have to accept the unacceptable that God plays favorites, or run from faith all together when the unthinkable happens.

This seeking of deeper understanding has led to countless resolutions on many topics but the end result has overwhelmingly been an ability to live a gospel centered life free of judgement where once judgement sat.  Free of a need to be comfortable.  Free to love the Lord my God with all my heart and all my soul and to love my neighbor.  There is no commandment greater than these.

So in the end, I reconcile my unending joy over my daughter by realizing that we were lucky to be a part of the outcome she's had.  We can celebrate God in her story by how we've come to meet so many incredible people and families and how we've been able to empathize and walk with them when few else would.  We can celebrate God in her story by how that story has caused a faith development that will serve as an incredible foundation from which we can show the world to her.  We can celebrate God in her story in ways that anyone, going through any circumstance, can still see God in our actions.

We don't have to parade a positive outcome around to celebrate God in her story and risk a false representation of our faith. 

So it is no exaggeration to say that my daughter broke my faith but what her story has built it into is beyond anything I could have imagined, I just wish it had been shown to me by someone without having to experience so much pain. 

I'm tired of being afraid
I'm wondering how I got this way
I'm trying to remember what life was like before
Panic moved in without even knocking on the door
Have mercy on me
I'm not who I used to be
Have mercy on me
Jesus, please