Faith and the Chair

For most of my Christian experience, which is at the 50-year mark since I was baptized on April 11, I have heard the analogy of faith being like trusting a chair. 

I always thought it was dumb. I am reminded of all the textbook renditions of Plato's Cave and his view of reality, and how often they used chair as the example. "In 'Heaven' there is a perfect chair, and all the chairs on earth are shadows of the perfect chair" it went. I often quipped that Heaven must be like a big furniture warehouse. 

Sitting on a chair is hardly analogous to giving your life to the care and control of a Supreme Being. I mean, you can see the chair, and if you wanted, you could test the chair before sitting. Of course, we rarely, rarely do. We just plop, or glide, or lower ourselves gracefully into the chair, depending on the type. 

But I'm rethinking it. 

Yesterday I went to the "young people's service" at church. It's not all young people, but it's a service for those who want to start a downtown branch closer to the university.  I like the energy. It was very crowded; no social distancing, really, but almost everyone obeyed the masking rule, as we do at our church. Not wanting to take the seat of a potential visitor who needs to be under the Word more than I might (a big presumption) I gave up my chair and ended up almost in the hallway on one of six chairs placed there. 

A young man, slender, maybe twenty, sat in a seat to my left. He ended up on the floor. It was a typical stackable chair used in churches nowadays. But this one gave way. 

It's a good thing the sitter was young and flexible. If a person my age sat there and fell through, it could have meant a bone break and a lawsuit. The ushers found him another chair quickly. And I noticed, watching him because of the "once burned twice shy" rule, that he lowered himself gingerly. Not just the first time, but the second after we rose to read the Scripture. 

I still think the chair analogy to faith is dumb, but .... if we find that faith "doesn't work" and we fall flat because our faith or the object of our faith seems to betray us or at least our expectations, what next? Does doubt come from that experience, or from somewhere else? What if the betrayal involves more than the embarrassment of sitting on your bum on the floor at a crowded church meeting? What if it means sexual abuse by a  leader? What if it means a leader takes off with church funds? Extreme, yet. And real.