Monday, August 06, 2007

Faith?

The sun sinks low, and here I go
Wrestling with questions that refuse an answer. . . .
Just as I satisfy my quest to justify God and His ways and drift off to sleep with a smile on my face whispering, "Transcendence, higher ways. . .", another fork appears in the road ahead and I sit bolt upright with a worried look.
Transcendence is the catch-all only if you continually keep your eyes upon the transcendent One.
But as you gaze steadfastly upon Him, something will inevitably begin to nag at you, and the feeling creeps over you that comes upon you when you are driving and become transfixed by some distant curiosity, or a bit of scenery, a map.
Lost in the distance, something begins to nag at you,
the road, the road
And your head jerks back around, catching an imaginary obstacle in the corner of your traitorous eye, swerve, and hit the ditch, only to get out, and find there was nothing in the road after all.
I realize keeping your eyes on the road while driving is the responsible thing to do.
But spiritual responsibility has a way of becoming a spiritual liability.
In other words, probably you shouldn't be the one driving.
Your imagination tends to run away with you.
This path of faith can be a place
So barren of what I understand
Someone once had the unmitigated gall to ask Daniel Boone if he'd ever gotten lost.
"No." he replied, with an addendum, "I got confused once for about two weeks, but I never have been lost."
Is that an equivocation, bravado or a lie?
Or, the truth.
Seeing as how he was still around for someone to ask him if he'd ever been lost, it appears we have to take him at his word when he said he hadn't.
Many's a time I've been making my way out of the brush, fighting through to a clearing ahead, and savagely kicking the same boulder I've already passed three times.
Two or three years ago, (you see how these crisis have a way of escaping us, hanging from a cliff, praying Oh God help me, seeing a disembodied hand reach down and pull us back over the edge, Never mind, God, this disembodied hand just helped me.) I was headed to work on a Saturday. To further set the scenario, I think we can assume we were hard up for money, or I can guarantee I would've been at home in bed. Anyway, the truck dies.
I'm not a mechanic. Having said that, let me elaborate. I hate working on cars, and much the hatred is multiplied when I'm working on a car that died on my way to work on a Saturday to earn some already needed money.
As I blundered around town asking questions, I kept fighting the rising doubt, the endless parade of open-ended decimal points and dollar signs
To counter this, I clutched a rosary and feverishly muttered a Hail Mary.
That is to say, I may as well have been.
I repeatedly assured myself, all in the name of faith, that the dead truck was going to undergo some sort of miraculous resurrection, something on the order of Lazarus, or a reversal of the fig tree.
Essentially, I was quoting a mantra, vain repetition, I think it's called, and invoking a heady line of positive thinking.
The trouble with positive thinking is that one single question mark negates all the positive and puts you back at square one.
I believe the truck will be fixed so I won't have to spend a lot of money on it.
The truck is going to cost a lot of money to fix so I must be going to get a check in the mail.
If you're God and you are allowing your pupil to undergo a trust exam and he's speeding around town, frantically repeating "God will take care of this, He will take care of this." do you graduate your pupil?
You're not and I'm not. God, on the other hand, is, and He prompts "Yes, I will take care of this and you, more specifically, if this culminates in your truck being hauled off to the junk yard."

More later

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sometimes you leave me speechless with your insight, so all I want to say is "thank you." Love, Mom

Anonymous said...

I'm trying to learn to "be content, no matter what"...But, sometimes it's hard when the thought comes to mind, "Well one fiasco down, 100 million more to go!" I guess that I'll just keep being a "poor beggar"--desperately clinging to the Lord and His promises.