Just the other day someone sat down to encourage me, but within a minute the conversation had turned to all the chaos, corruption, and cruelty in the world. I watched their brow furrow deeper and deeper, until finally they said, “It just feels like there’s a weight that makes it so hard to have faith in these times. I want hope, but I don’t always know how.” I think a lot of us feel that. So how do we have faith when the world feels upside down? Here are three facets of it.
First, faith is turning. Jesus, quoting Isaiah, describes people who look but never perceive and listen but never understand, with hearts grown callous. And his invitation is simple: turn back, and I will heal you. Turning isn’t just rearranging our theology in our heads. It’s a posture of the whole being, our eyes, ears, minds, and hearts turning toward the source of love. And notice what we turn toward is not mainly a set of rules, but a beautiful, cross-shaped way of life. As one writer put it, our job isn’t to protest the world into moral conformity, but to attract it to the saving beauty of Christ. If you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus.
Second, faith is awakening. George MacDonald opened one of his books with just two words: “I awoke.” C.S. Lewis said his imagination was baptized long before he became a Christian. Faith is waking up to a bigger, more beautiful reality that was there all along. In my family, some of us wake up slow and surly and some bounce up ready to conquer the day. It doesn’t matter. Whether your faith dawns like a slow sunrise or bursts like a supernova, Jesus just wants us to come awake.
Third, faith is seeking. Jesus said ask, seek, knock. He was asked around 200 questions in the Gospels and answered only a handful directly, while asking some 300 of his own. He loved curiosity more than certainty. As a line from the film Conclave puts it, if there were only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery, and no need for faith. Doubt and faith forged together make a stronger alloy. So if you’ve got questions, you’re in the right place.
Turn, awaken, seek. That’s what faith looks like, even now.
We’d love to have you join us. Garden City Church meets every Sunday at 10:00 AM in Tacoma, right across from Wright Park. Come as you are, whether you’ve walked with Jesus for years or you’re just curious and checking things out. This is a place you can belong before you believe. Find us at gardencitynw.com for directions and what to expect.