The Gospel in Practice, Part 2: The Majestic Grandness of God vs. the Pathetic Faith of His Children -or- Faith in the House of Mary
My first post in this series dealt with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This one concerns an E-mail I received from an old high-school acquaintance.
Pretty broad category, this whole "gospel" thing.
In 1990, a friend was killed in a tragic car accident. My friends and I had just started a band, and I wrote a song to try to deal with my thoughts and feelings in the midst of that tragedy. It was the first time I had put pen to paper to relay my thoughts and feelings to the world. What emerged was a scathing indictment of the notion of God, in light of my experiences with the tragedy, a lyrical shorthand summary of the Problem of Evil.
The other day, I received an E-mail message from someone very close to the kid who died in 1990. We were never very close, and I remember him only from the circumstances surrounding the incident, primarily because of his utter devastation. His message to me was that he had stumbled upon my website about my forthcoming book, my latest attempt to put pen to paper to deal with my thoughts and feelings, where what emerged was a 200-page analysis of the reality and glory of God, in light of my experiences with a different sort of tragedy. He simply wanted to let me know that it made his heart glad to read about the book, and to also let me know that he, too, had recently started on a journey of faith.
There's an overarching message here about salvation, about alpha and omega, but I just can't seem to put it into words.
Anyway, he also told me a little about his journey in faith so far. One thing that struck me was that he mentioned that he had left his wife because of her refusal to accept the Christian faith. That made me very sad. I could not understand how someone who claims the faith of Jesus Christ would choose to leave their wife rather than endure the hardships of living a life of a disciple and have faith that the wife will, one day, see the light. I started to think about all the ways that we Christians fail in our faith nowadays, and I began to think that we are nothing but a big group of hypocrites, each in his/her varying degrees. And I began to think of the faith of the earliest disciples, and how much more robust, how much more dedicated it was.
And then I though about it some more. And my mind went to the place in Scripture that I'm currently reading in my own private worship, the Book of Acts. Yes, Acts chronicles some remarkable feats of faith, but my mind did not go to those. It went to the scene in Acts 12, where Peter has been imprisoned and his friends have gathered in Mary's house to pray for his release. And pray. And pray. And Peter in fact escapes by some miracle that can only be described as the work of an angel. And he comes to the door Mof ary's house, and when the maid sees that it's him and she goes back to tell the small band of faithful Christians that their prayers have been answered, what do they say?
"You are out of your mind!"
I love the Bible. Yes, it contains many stories of supernatural acts of faith, but it also tells the stories of ordinary men and women, knowing that they must pray, trusting in the God who answers prayer, and then refusing to recognize it when He does. God's majesty is a monumental, gargantuan, cosmic thing. We're all gonna miss it sometimes.
But sometimes not.
Hope is a good thing.
Grace and Peace,
Raffi
Pretty broad category, this whole "gospel" thing.
In 1990, a friend was killed in a tragic car accident. My friends and I had just started a band, and I wrote a song to try to deal with my thoughts and feelings in the midst of that tragedy. It was the first time I had put pen to paper to relay my thoughts and feelings to the world. What emerged was a scathing indictment of the notion of God, in light of my experiences with the tragedy, a lyrical shorthand summary of the Problem of Evil.
The other day, I received an E-mail message from someone very close to the kid who died in 1990. We were never very close, and I remember him only from the circumstances surrounding the incident, primarily because of his utter devastation. His message to me was that he had stumbled upon my website about my forthcoming book, my latest attempt to put pen to paper to deal with my thoughts and feelings, where what emerged was a 200-page analysis of the reality and glory of God, in light of my experiences with a different sort of tragedy. He simply wanted to let me know that it made his heart glad to read about the book, and to also let me know that he, too, had recently started on a journey of faith.
There's an overarching message here about salvation, about alpha and omega, but I just can't seem to put it into words.
Anyway, he also told me a little about his journey in faith so far. One thing that struck me was that he mentioned that he had left his wife because of her refusal to accept the Christian faith. That made me very sad. I could not understand how someone who claims the faith of Jesus Christ would choose to leave their wife rather than endure the hardships of living a life of a disciple and have faith that the wife will, one day, see the light. I started to think about all the ways that we Christians fail in our faith nowadays, and I began to think that we are nothing but a big group of hypocrites, each in his/her varying degrees. And I began to think of the faith of the earliest disciples, and how much more robust, how much more dedicated it was.
And then I though about it some more. And my mind went to the place in Scripture that I'm currently reading in my own private worship, the Book of Acts. Yes, Acts chronicles some remarkable feats of faith, but my mind did not go to those. It went to the scene in Acts 12, where Peter has been imprisoned and his friends have gathered in Mary's house to pray for his release. And pray. And pray. And Peter in fact escapes by some miracle that can only be described as the work of an angel. And he comes to the door Mof ary's house, and when the maid sees that it's him and she goes back to tell the small band of faithful Christians that their prayers have been answered, what do they say?
"You are out of your mind!"
I love the Bible. Yes, it contains many stories of supernatural acts of faith, but it also tells the stories of ordinary men and women, knowing that they must pray, trusting in the God who answers prayer, and then refusing to recognize it when He does. God's majesty is a monumental, gargantuan, cosmic thing. We're all gonna miss it sometimes.
But sometimes not.
Hope is a good thing.
Grace and Peace,
Raffi
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