How can faith make a difference in my life?

Genuine faith helps counter cynicism

The Rev. Peter Luckey, senior pastor, Plymouth Congregational Church, 925 Vt.:

Elton Trueblood writes, “Faith is not belief without proof, but trust without reservation.”

The grounding of that trust is not in any one thing, but in the ground of everything: God. The words are simple, the living of them anything but.

The psychiatrist Victor Frankl endured three grim years at Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp. Throughout his experience in the most extreme and egregious forms of human suffering, Frankl observed that victims who persevered the best were the ones who had an inner faith, an inner sense that life is meaningful.

In an uncertain and nonsensical world, faith often seems naive, sheer foolishness.

But genuine faith is more than wishful thinking. It is a defiant response in the face of all the tugs to become anxious and cynical.

People often mistake doubt as the opposite of faith. Doubt is not the opposite of faith, but an element in it. The true opposite of faith is anxiety.

Perhaps one of the best signs of faith is laughter — not the laugh of sarcasm, but the full belly laugh, a wellspring of joy rising up from within, even when the world rains on our parade.

When God told 100-year-old Abraham that his 90-year-old wife, Sarah, was finally going to have a baby, Abraham “fell on his face and laughed” (Genesis 17:17).

Sarah laughed, too. And when God asked her about it, she denied it.

“No, but you did laugh,” God said. God got the final laugh, because God named the baby Isaac. Isaac in Hebrew means “laughter.”

Did Sarah and Abraham laugh because God’s promise seemed like a joke, or did they laugh because — if indeed this came true — this would truly give them something to laugh about? I believe the latter.

Each of us is given a brief span of time on this Earth. Life will be a heady mixture of beauty and tragedy, wonder and heartache. Yet, what if we could say no matter what comes, life is a gift from a loving God? Would that not be an occasion to trust without reservation? To laugh with our whole heart?

Send e-mail to the Rev. Peter Luckey at peterluckey@sunflower.com.

Strength, hope, joy spring from faith

The Rev. Darrel Proffitt, senior pastor, St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church, 5700 W. Sixth St.:

In my experience, people are unable to handle the crises they face in life with any hope if they do not have faith.

We all face problems that are huge and challenges that are great. If we hope to survive, or even thrive on a deeper level, faith will make the difference.

Yet people with faith are often criticized that it is like having a crutch. If you cannot deal with the reality of life and its problems, then faith is sought, they claim.

My response to such criticism is simple: So what? If I am trying to walk on a broken leg, a crutch can be a huge help. The problems that all people face in this life are immense. Without faith, it’s like trying to walk on a fractured leg. Faith provides us with strength, hope and joy. It does not limit us; it provides us with an understanding that all that we see is not all that there is.

Faith is the indispensable element in a life that seeks to move beyond the mundane and ordinary. It is the only way to live life beyond the surface. In a book in the Bible, we are told that “faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.”

There is no faith without risk. Faith means stepping out into the unknown, and you don’t know what’s in the unknown. The Bible says, “We walk by faith, not by sight.” That means we walk, looking with spiritual eyes, not with physical eyes. We look at it from God’s point of view, not from our point of view.

As a friend told me today, with faith we do not need to tell God how big our storms are, but rather, we need to tell our storms how big our God is. Seeking faith is the first step in finding it.

Send e-mail to the Rev. Darrel Proffitt at stmargaret@sbc.global.net.