Faith Sold Separately

It was back in mid November before Thanksgiving that it all started. I didn’t know at the time that my world as I knew it was about to be turned upside down. It was then that I slowly started to lose something so precious to me without even realizing that I was losing it. I thought it was my hope, or was it my faith? Here is my question to you. Is it possible to have hope without faith? You may think the relationship between faith and hope is obvious but actually it’s a bit more complex than that.

So what was this earth-shattering event that took place? Someone did something unthinkable to my little boy, and this unthinkable act took place at our church camp. A place where our family vacationed for ten days every year. A place I felt to be sacred where I myself have actually felt the presence of God. To say my faith was shaken is an understatement. It was absolutely shattered. I’ve never felt so many emotions at one time before. I felt angry, hurt, confused, betrayed, vulnerable, and empty. I tried desperately to remind myself that God was in control. I tried to grasp and take hold of God’s promises. But how could this happen? Why? I now questioned everything that I believed in.

I’ve always thought of myself as having a strong faith. I have been through many trials and despite the doubts and pain that had accompanied each one; I have always felt that in the end there was lesson that was learned and that my faith had been made stronger. I admit that I’m not a very trusting person and that I struggle in this area. These past trials have made me very aware that I have absolutely no control over them and have forced me to learn to trust. My only option was to trust. So why was this so different? The difference was that this trial had nothing to do with an illness such as cancer or a martial problem, as hard as those both may be. This was my child and probably any mother’s worst nightmare. At this point, all bets are off.

Someone once told me that just because you believe something to be true still doesn’t make it true. He does not believe in God. He believes that people choose to believe in God out of fear and the need to have something to believe in. In essence he believes it to be a coping mechanism. With all that was going on in my life at the time, this really put me over the edge and made me ask myself the question. Why do I believe what I believe? How do I know that it’s true? And so the search began.

What is faith and how does it differ from belief? True faith is trusting in God. We trust in God to take care of us. Trust means a willingness to put ourselves under Him, not out of fear but out of love. When we trust God, we love Him. Faith can be defined as a belief in the truth without having justification or logical proof. I think St. Anselm best captured the essence of faith when he said, “I do not seek to understand so that I may believe, but I believe so that I may understand, and what is more I believe that unless I do believe I shall not understand.” I think he’s right in that how can we understand something that we don’t believe in.

Faith is an expression of the present but hope is directed more towards the future. Faith is the result of our beliefs that we have gained through our experiences, whereas hope is the product of our desires. Now back to my original question, can we have hope without faith? The answer is no, we can’t have hope without faith. When we have hope we have faith that says, I believe that the future will be better, although we have no grounds to prove our hopeful assumptions, yet we still have faith in them. While faith without hope is possible, hope without faith is not. I’ll give you the analogy that best helped me to understand. Let’s use oxygen and fire as an example. Oxygen is necessary for fire. If we have fire we can know that oxygen is present. Lucky for us, oxygen isn’t sufficient for fire though. Faith is necessary for our hope but faith isn’t sufficient for our hope because we can have faith about many things and yet still have no real hope. This is the lesson from the book of Job. Often the truest faith comes in the absence of the fulfillment of our directed intention.

God is faithful. We have all heard the saying that “He will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear” (1 Corinthians 10:13). Sometimes I definitely wish that I wouldn’t be able to handle the things that God seems to think I can handle. I often wonder if He has a sense of humor. Hope, faith, and love are the very essence of Christianity. Christ is the actual object of the believer’s hope, and the hope that is set before us is eternal life.

So what is the moral of this story? I’m still learning to trust, but I have faith that God will do something great out of such a tragic situation, and most of all hope that one day we will all be fully restored.

Just a day in the life…