Faith Sucks

We struggle to try to "do the right thing." We struggle to know God's will. We struggle to reconcile His will with our will, which often means bargaining for some time and fooling ourselves that it is ok to be faithful in fulfilling God's will on our own terms. Ultimately, we hope to eventually learn to carry our cross and be patient, waiting for God to work. This is hard, and it helps to vent to a friend from time to time and share the struggle.

I was commiserating about spiritual struggles over dinner with a friend on Thursday night, and there was a group of people talking next to us about religion and church attendance. We only overheard snippets of the conversations like "that's why I love the Lutherans because you can do whatever you want!" It seemed as though their conversation shared the same bit of our anxiety in managing the challenges of our Christian spiritual lives. Then we overheard one young lady at the table responded to all this with "I wouldn't know, I'm an atheist." This stopped me in my tracks with envy. My immediate reaction was "how fortunate you are." 

I wish I were an atheist. I wish I could deny God's existence. I wish I could escape the responsibility of being a witness for Christ. Clearly, faith is a laudable characteristic in the Judeo-Christian ethos (1 Sam 2:35, Rev. 3:14, I Cor 4:17, Col 4:7, II Tim 2:2, Matt 25:21) and we admire all the members of the hall of faith in Hebrews 11. However, there is not a single example of someone who did not suffer in some way for this faith, and in the short term their life would have been much easier to deny their faith. Jonah is a good example of someone who recognized the challenge of being faithful to God's will. His decision to go in the opposite direction of Nineveh was not just an act of defiance - it was based on a hope that God did not exist on the boat or in Tarshish. He wanted to be an atheist. The captain of the boat woke him up and reminded him that God exists and that his faith in God comes with a responsibility. 

Maybe I'm the only one. Maybe all the other Christians in the world are in perpetual honeymoon bliss with Our Lord, the Beloved. Maybe I need more faith. Unfortunately, I cannot say that I feel that way sometimes. When I feel my spiritual life is making demands I cannot meet, I do not naturally wish to have the faith of Abraham - I wish to have the faith of Jonah. I do not want to sacrifice Isaac, I want to run away and pretend God does not exist. This may not make any sense, but it doesn't have to make any sense as long as I end with #justsayin.

Be a Hero

There are many words in the English language that have partially lost their meaning as a result of colloquial overuse (like, literally, love, etc). One of those words is "hero." We say things like "X is my hero" when X is a person that is famous for being rich or funny or fun to be around. It's not bad to be any of those things but does that really constitute heroism?

If we try to think about how to properly define the modern hero, we should come up with a common attribute that is shared among people that anyone would consider a "real hero" like a firefighter who risks himself to save others, a father who invests his whole self in supporting his family, or even Christ Himself who sacrificed everything for the sake of Love. The common denominator, the DNA of heroism, is self sacrifice for the sake of someone or something else. 

This element of self denial is crucial because if someone makes a sacrifice for his own sake, it is not really a sacrifice but an investment or calculated risk. This is all fine and good if we are talking about success, but once again, I think we need to make a real distinction between success and heroism - only then can we ask ourselves which one we should really admire. If we aspire to have a world that is filled with successful people, then we would expect everyone to be above average. This the world of inflated grades, participation trophies and entitlement in the workplace. If we are tired of this world, we can only escape it by aspiring to have a world that is filled with heroes, so that we may expect everyone not to care where they are in the bell curve but rather care how much they sacrifice of themselves for others. 

This is a new world that admires St. Therese of Lisieux, the little flower of Jesus, not because she "did anything special" but simply because she exchanged love with God and others without expecting that to be a currency for self aggrandizement. We have much to learn from this idea of loving and giving up of ourselves without expecting that this will in some way increase our stature. It is a soft deception to love with expectation. 

Again I write here to myself. Again I write hoping someone will read this and see me one day in my hypocrisy and say "didn't you write about this and say not to do that?" May God help us all to repent from our selfish ways. May He help us to see others ahead of ourselves. May He help us to be heroes like Him who first loved us.