When Your Losing Faith and Need Some Inspiration

We gather around table, bowing heads.  No pews.  No holy cross staring at us from some sanctuary.  No spiritual music calling us deeper.

Just ladies.  All ages. Weak.  Vulnerable.  Trying to gain faith and strength in our weariness.

And we recognize, sometimes “having faith” can be tough, in a day where children die, lives get ripped apart, sickness ravishes those we love…even though we prayed hard for their healing.

And sometimes faith is more like floating, face to heaven, back arched, body vulnerable to the ever-changing, life-giving water beneath us.  Seemingly going nowhere…though a current moves deep beneath…in a place we cannot see.

He’s about to run a race, our friend from the Special Olympics.  “I want the gold”…he says this year, I am “going for it”. He’s trained and fought, and waited for this opportunity.  And even disabilities won’t keep him…excuses, explanations, or coddling that says, “Don’t worry.  You have every excuse to not try hard”. 

The race begins…and isn’t it there, the spikes of this life always want to disqualify us?  But rules, regulations, or his challenges aren’t about to stop a person who knows and lives out, exactly what they were created for. (Watch Kyle’s inspiring video HERE)

Because when real faith burns…its inferno is contagious and we have to follow what’s always “fruit-producing)…something tangable our eyes will eventually see…either in this side of heaven, or in eternity.

A friend of my daughter, her dad went surfing in Hawaii this past week.  A fun vacation, a time of memories, laughter, and relaxing…

But sometimes the waves in our lives have other plans.  He was changed forever that day.  Today He sits paralyzed from the neck down.  That wave, unapologetic-ally bashing him against the ground of the ocean floor. (Follow the journey to healing HERE)

But this man’s excuse that he cannot move from the chest down, does not rob him from his smile, from his pouring love on those that visit him in the hospital of Honolulu.

And isn’t that faith friends?  When you can’t move.  When you can’t see how you will ever get out of a situation.  When your livelihood fails, health fails, and when all your hopes and dreams come crashing down by some unseen current that you never saw coming, or expected…

Yet, you retain joy.  Because joy and peace ,and hope are the effects of one who knows who they are in Christ, despite their visible circumstances.

Our other friend is young.  He was the “biker I met in the back of our church” one day, years ago. (Read our friends story HERE) Big, appearing gruff man…but filled with so much faith.  The hurricane of thoughts that poured from him the first time he came to our small group, I still can remember clearly.

Unpolished and unassuming…but his faith burned like fire in a room of “lukewarm” Christians.

And though he just had a heart attack, though everyone around him have been dying off like flies little by little, one at a time…and his heart has been broken in a thousand pieces….This powerhouse of the faith has come to cling to the only one who sustains us when all else fails…

For isn’t true faith unconditional on circumstances, unwavered by feelings, or worship, or preachers, or meetings, or something external that our hands can retain….

Faith, true, lasting, sustainable faith, can only burn in us…when we fan the flames, looking to the Author and Perfecter of our faith, as we keep treading one foot in front of the other…and commit to not stopping until we finish the race.

We sit around our kitchen table.  Us women.  Believing waves of this life were made to carry us…never to intentionally destroy us.  Clinging to a God who is with us; when people die, lives curl up in pain…and things don’t go away.

Because faith, held onto, believed and is best sustainable when many stand with us, committed to help us ignite something in us, multiplying the faith already in us…until heated coals turn into fanning flames.

And it is there, we trust a God who is the God of the waves, the God of life and death, the God of all of our races…whether we win in perfectly laced shoes…or pass the finish line, bare…broken, hurting, needing friends beside us to bandage our wounds.

Today friends, you are welcome to my kitchen table.  It’s old, cup stained, and the chairs are warn and weary….But together, we can lift each other up to the God who always was and who reigns for all of eternity.

And wherever you are at, flying high, or taken back by the obstacles, seemingly determined to paralyze us…

Together.  Here.  Now.  We can encourage one other. Living a life of faith.  Faith that is not flat-line…but rises higher, burns stronger, continues relentlessly until together we finish the race….

So we are always of good courage. We know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight. ~ 2 Cor 5:6-7

(Linking with Tracy, Lyli)