On Faith in the Very Slow Middle
Faith is forever the same, and always new.
It never stops being what it was when you first met Christ. Yet every season brings new depth and pressure, thereby newly refining our experience of that age old thing Christians have been singing about through the centuries:
What it is to trust God.
What is it to trust God, after all?
Faith was always more than what conversion calls and academy classes made it out to be. It was never merely to believe with the mind and then go on about things as they were. It was always to entrust with the life into the radical effect of giving oneself back after having lived in charge.
Faith—real faith—sees us hand everything over, all our remaining life as an unfinished script, to then let God author its blankness. And since God the Author is a very good one, he will always prefer to write stories the way good authors write. He will show rather than tell. This means for us, characters in his story, a lifetime of finding out what God has in mind to show us incrementally, and never all at once.
“Therefore we do not lose heart...For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweights them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen.”
Faith comes word by word, line by line. And this is hard on us because we want assurances. We want information. We want to know when and how and what and where. We want the last page first. We think it would make things easier, knowing the end from the beginning.
But easier is not better. And to wish for a spoiler is to both wish away what faith really is and to spoil its reward.
Faith is a transfer of trust. And functional faith means not only anticipating the Author’s climactic end but also learning to rest in the slow middle. Faith, in fact, is not really for the final page, for on the final page (along with hope) faith will have finished its task, retired, and love will be all that’s left.
Faith is for the very slow middle.
And faith in the slow middle requires the cultivating of a rebellious imagination. By imagination, I mean a mental posture. A way of looking at the happenings of life that views as ultimate reality not that which we see, or feel, pressing in on us in the immediate. When lost, when confused, when uncertain, faith rejects lostness, confusion, and uncertainty as permanent or true. It provokes us to remember that how it feels now is not how it is and that what we see now is not all there is to see. The end will be beautiful, we know; but the middle is not safe or seamless. Still, the Author is writing, we know.
Faith, therefore, wills us to rest in the unfinished finished of an ongoing drama. Faith calls us to lie down in green pastures, alongside quiet waters, even while looming valleys of darkness still menace ahead and behind and around. Faith knows a better day is coming. So it teaches us to sit comfortably in the uncomfortable, relentlessly choosing to hope.
And it is hard.
That faith is hard on us does not lessen God’s commitment to it, however. Its reward is in its difficulty, its potency in its gradualness. God’s plan is not to torment you in the waiting but to give you something much better than a spoiler. Divine revelation and intimacy, long fermented. God’s ultimate will is to help you not just see what He ends up writing, but for you to come to be in an unending state of discovery, finding out again and again how faithful he always turns out to be. Faith’s reward, therefore, is to find Him on page after page, always there and always having been—the Author who writes himself into your story as redeemer, as helper, as guide, and friend—and then to someday finally arrive at the end of it all having seen through life’s every hour, word by word, line by line, that God was in fact as the songs had said—faithful all along, good all the while.
Oh, to arrive at weathered old age having found the great and dramatic trustworthiness of God proved to be worth our trusting.
So we commit to the drama of life with God. In the end it will leave us singing, as it has for the rest:
how sweet it was to trust in Jesus.
