Dear America: You Have Lost Your Faith and I Intend to Find It
Dear America,
It’s been a hard day, and all I want is a cigarette, but all I’ve got is this stale cup of coffee and a Bible in front of me so you might not like what I have to say.
Where has your faith gone?
Where has my faith gone?
I woke up on Saturday, dutifully reminding God while brushing my teeth that I was about to leave in eight days on the trip He placed on my heart to take, and, just in case He didn’t know, I wanted to remind Him that I still did not have a car.
Not only that, but I still owed $400 in parking tickets, and I wasn’t quite sure anyone was going to let me register a vehicle with that kind of debt.
What was this doubt that clouded my mind? Just last week my friend Clint took me to the Apple Store, walked me right inside, and told me to buy anything I wanted. Anything I wanted? What I wanted was to drop to my knees and cry out in thanks in front of God and Steve Jobs and everyone. But Clint told me it was okay; he’d been saving for that computer for six months, and he just now had the money. Because God has clearly been planning this trip longer than I have.
And in that moment I knew, without a doubt, God was going to provide everything I needed to blog my way across America.
Yet how quickly I lost my faith, my mouth full of toothpaste on a Saturday morning as I was bold enough, stupid enough, to tell God something that I believed he may have forgotten.
Three hours later, I stopped by my PO Box and found someone had rather unexpectedly mailed me a check for $500.
Took me seven more hours to realize I had prayed ten hours earlier for a car and a way to pay off those parking tickets, if, in fact, God was going to come through with that car like He said He was.
A God who works like that, that quick to respond and plan ahead all along, should not only be worshiped, but feared.
Yet we seem reluctant to fear. Which begs the question: if you have no fear of God, do you really know God?
And I will tell you myself, it’s not that I am reluctant to fear God.
It’s that I do not know God.
It turns out, I know nothing of God. And I want to fear him. I’m not reluctant to fear him. I don’t fear God because I don’t know God.
I don’t know the God of the Bible.
The God in the book of Isaiah who challenges Jacob by asking, “Who is like me? Look at the night skies. Who made all this? Who marches this army of stars out each night, counts them off, calls each by name? …Spread out the facts before us. If you are gods, explain what the past means, or, failing that, tell us what will happen in the future. Can’t you do that?”
The same God that asks Job, “Who is this that darkness my council with words without knowledge? Brace yourself like a man. And I will question you. Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me if you already understand everything. Who is it that told the ocean, ‘Here is where your proud waves halt.’? Surely you know if you were there.”
The very God that opened His mouth and breathed the sun into existence.
That is the God I want to know.
However, the only God I do know is the God of our churches and society. Our God of comfort and materialism. A God that only lives in air conditioned churches on Sunday mornings. The God of positive thinking that the Joel Osteens of the world claim says, “Everything is good all the time, and we should live our best life now.” This is the God that has a plan to fix your life.
I don’t want that God.
Because I don’t need fixed.
I want the Jesus of the Bible. The Jesus that died for me when I was of absolutely no use to him. The Jesus that deserves so much more than simply checking off on a comment card at church on a Sunday morning that I’ve been saved and please send me more information. Jesus already knows I’ve been saved. I want the Jesus in the book of Matthew that warned the disciples, “This is hazardous work I have assigned you.”
Good for you for checking that box. If you’re serious, now your life truly begins. I want to follow the Jesus that says, “Now let me make a new kind of fisherman out of you.”
The Jesus that did not come to bring peace to the earth, but a sword.
The God that shouts in Isaiah: “I have been quiet long enough…I am letting loose, letting go…stripping the hills bare, withering the wildflowers…drying up the rivers…but I will take the hand of those who do not know the way, directing them through an unknown country.
…But those who invested in the no-gods…you are dead broke.”
And that same God says just a few verses later, “I’d sell off the whole world to get you back, trade the creation just for you.”
Do any of you really know that kind of love in your life? A love pouring forth from someone willing to sell off the entire world and all of creation just for you?
I want that.
And I want to fear that.
So, America, I am coming for you because I believe this God is in every footprint, on top of every mountain, and swimming through every wave in every ocean. I believe He spills himself out over us in every sunset and sunrise, and every shooting-star shower; that His voice is speaking in every gust of wind. He’s in every lightening storm and every homeless shelter, and His Kingdom of Heaven resides in every last one of our hearts where we’re all too stupid and unsentimental to look.
And I believe He. Is. Faithful.
Would you have ever lost your faith, America, if you’d known this God all along?
On March 1st, I intend to find out.
…And oh yeah, last night: God gave me the car.
All best,
MAD
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