i spent the day away with may today… we had a good time going shopping together and afterwards headed over to liberty ms for her open house. i decided before entering the doors how relieved i am not to be a middle school teacher. dozens of tweenies swarmed the place and it made me feel dizzy. it must be a very different feeling for may, though… i found it so strange that she was beginning this part of life while i’m already out of college… and when i told her that as we buckled our seatbelts in the car, about to go home, she replied – “well, i feel like eighth grade is quite old, you know.”
well, fair enough. i feel like twenty-two is also quite old, but out here in the working world, they’re baby years. i’m trying to wait patiently for what God has in store for me while also doing my best to get a job. and i realize that life in general is like that too – a delicate balance of both trusting in God and simple perseverance. you might call one “faith” and the other one “works”. when asked which is more important – faith or works – what would your reply be? thinking of life in general, not specifically in the attempt to achieve something, like a job, for example. in the past, my answer would have been – “well, faith by far, of course, because with faith comes works. if you first believe in something then you will automatically become a doer.” i still believe in this but something clicked in my mind the other night when i was reading c.s. lewis’ chapter on faith in mere christianity… i realized that I had failed to acknowledge the flip-side, that sometimes doing things can also produce faith. more importantly than that, I realized that valuing faith over works also risks the possibility that your actions are executed simply in accordance to one’s emotions and not to one’s faith. i’ve learned that faith actually has little to do with emotions and much more to do with good solid reason. once your reason persuades you to believe in something, your perseverance in believing in it, through thick and thin, is your faith. and your faith can not automatically remain alive but must be trained in the habit of faith, being fed everyday. this is how i understood that i was wrong about the nature of convictions… i had thought that when someone becomes deeply convicted of something, then this transforms the heart so completely that your life becomes radically changed, all without having to be “kept alive”. eh… not so much. faith and actions go hand in hand: work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who worketh in you.
beautifully put : )
and what a coincidence, because this is exactly what I read about in augustine’s confessions for my relc class today.
hehehe I like how you write.
faith must be “trained in the habit of faith, being fed everyday”
thanks, Lynn.