Meanderings about a Key Theological Concept

 Last night I attended a church event for women. It was inspiring and emotional and heart felt. There is not criticism in this piece, only reflection on my own experience. 

A panel of women spoke meaningfully of God’s faithfulness in their lives. But a voice said to me, that voice of debate and questioning I can't seem to quell, "Were they really talking about their own faithfulness? That they kept believing and praying and living in the “Christian way” even when their immediate situations were hopeless or crumbling around them?" I'm not proud of that voice, but I'm going to interrogate it. 

A young woman who lost her baby—unthinkable, and she didn’t say what had happened to him, only that he was unresponsive and in the hospital for a month—told that two family members were converted and one brought back from estrangement. And they had more children, not replacements but gifts. Gifts to make up for the baby’s loss? Gifts for being faithful and not dismissing God from their lives? That is the voice of a cynic.

So I’m struggling here, in the aftermath of these “stories” (not stories, but accounts of life-altering experiences) to see where God was faithful. And I would have to ask them at more depth, and I would have to explore my own. I am not without my stories, although death of a baby is the worst one can go through in my eyes because my only child is so dear to me.

God is faithful for providing medical care.

God is faithful for providing physical benefits.

God is faithful for giving me mental health in these things.

God is faithful for making me capable of making a living when my husband couldn’t or wouldn’t.

God is faithful in not allowing me to walk away. I may want to think that was my saying, but it wasn’t. And that is the point.

It is all about perspective. If I live in a me-centered, almost narcissistic way, I am only seeing how I kept on the path of Christian faith and maneuvered through the various struggles of physical abuse, mental illness in family, extreme infertility, losing my father early, caring for my mom, and a disabled brother. I can say, “I’m strong,” but I also know it’s hard to get out of bed some days.

The difference is perspective. None of what I have been and done and gone through without God’s sovereign purpose working out in me. Ironic, of course, that someone who researches gratitude would be oblivious of this fact—not a belief, but grounded truth. God is faithful because He is faithful. His faithfulness does not need defense; his faithfulness undergirds the universe.

A lovely African American young women in ministry wanting to be married (where are the men?) mentioned that she was all about God’s faithfulness when things were going well, when she got into the college she wanted, when she got onto the basketball team she wanted. Later, when she couldn’t be in the nursing program due to her grades, God was still faithful but saying no. And now, ten years later, she is in a nursing program. I think this might have been an answer to my quandary. All these women got better things later. Maybe not what they wanted, but good things they didn’t expect at the time.  We are surrounded by God’s faithfulness but tend not to talk about it until we lose something we want badly.

God's faithfulness is not on a timetable, is perhaps what I needed to hear. As dark a time as I have had in the last year and a half, something good or perhaps even better will come out of it. Not some physical benefit for me, necessarily; not money, not a great marriage, not fun experiences. At some point I will have a clearer sense of who I am with God (That is happening), I will be able to talk to others about it in a nonjudgmental and non-angry way. And others involved in my "story" (I'm starting not to like that term) will come out differently as well.

Still, we talk about God so glibly, so arrogantly, as if we so have Him figured out.  That must be one of our greatest sins. We think we know so much. We know so little.