Tangible Faith

Faith is a choice that has no dependence on feelings and offers no tangible substance.  And when I most need faith, God gives me both feelings and tangible substance.  I know the theologians among us are already shaking their heads and parroting their fundamental doctrine that upholds the absence not only of emotion and touch, but also of sight and reason.  But when I sit in my grief or the confusion of my turmoil, and I long for God to give what the theologians say He does not give, I experience something far different when my look is Godward.  I hear His voice.  I feel His touch.  I am embraced by the warmth of His love.  I see Him alive in His children that surround me, and in the intricacies and brilliance of His creation.  My thoughts are quieted, and His Spirit whispers assurance and details every reason to simply trust with a faith that supposedly cannot be given substance, and yet I have it.  Why?  Faith is a gift of grace and grace will always meet the need.

The gospels are replete with the stories of physically or emotionally broken people, weary of their sin, desperate for the touch of one who would care.  Need rarely exists without emotion, and their need and its resultant despair or hopelessness, brought them to Jesus.  How often did He touch the untouchable and redirect the thinking of the oppressed?  How often did He give from His inexhaustible love?  Has He changed?  No, my faith will not allow me to believe He has changed.  We may not see Him in a body of flesh and blood, but we can still see Him.  I can testify, as can countless others, of unseen, but tangible arms that have wrapped themselves around me.  I cannot count how many times I have been audibly directed by this One who is not only God, but personal, intimate Father. Yes, there are times when God can seem so very far away, but there are also times when I can feel so incredibly at one with His essence.

Faith is indeed a choice, but the faith God enlarges when I am most desperate for my God, is much more than cold words of doctrine.  It is deep and vibrant, bigger than anything that can touch my life, and it reveals a God who is just the same.  The aliveness of my God reverberates through my spirit and satisfies the need that is there, and tangible reality is added to my choice of faith.  Taste and see that the Lord is good ... The eyes of the Lord watch ... his ears are open ... He rescues ... The Lord is close to the brokenhearted.

– Bev

(Related Bible reading: Psalm 34:4-18)