Building Relationship, Building Faith
I used to work as a cabin leader at a summer camp. The camp had a mix of well-to-do kids and some low-income kids who were sponsored to come. One year, during the camp for the high school aged kids, I had a girl in my cabin from a foster home. We'll call her B. B was hurting so much, and had walls around her a mile thick. She shut out all of the other kids in the cabin, and spent most of her time with the other kids from foster homes in other cabins.
On the last night of camp, B started telling me about how she didn't feel included in the cabin. It seemed to me that the other girls weren't deliberately excluding her. Instead, from the very beginning, B didn't really engage with them, and so the others soon gave up. So I talked to her about how friendship is a two-way street. In order to make a friend, you have to be a friend. In order to build trust with someone, you have to give them something to be trustworthy with. I talked to her about how it can be scary to open up and be vulnerable with others, but that is what you have to do if you're going to make a friend. But you can start with something small, and if that goes well, you gradually build up until you can trust the person with something bigger.
B was visibly upset, so after a while, one of the other girls came up and asked her what was wrong. B froze and didn't say anything. You could see the fear in her eyes. I gently suggested that this could be an opportunity to take a risk, be a little vulnerable, and see what happens. I don't remember exactly what happened, but I do remember it went well. B said how she felt left out, and the other girl reassured her.
I haven't seen or heard from B since that week at camp, but I do hope she is alright.
This story came to mind last night during the sermon at church. The pastor was speaking about what we take as proof that God exists. He asked us to consider what was it that convinced us to believe in God. For me, I cannot think of one big, defining moment that caused me to believe in God. Rather, much like how trust builds in a relationship, my faith in God was built little by little.
When I was young, my belief in God and my prayers were rather simple. I remember once, I couldn't find my homework, and then I prayed, and it was in the very next place I looked. Or my first summer volunteering at summer camp, when I was 14, and everyone was praying in a big group. When it was my turn, I was so nervous, but I prayed anyhow, and it felt so much better praying in a group than alone.
Even as a child, though, not all of my prayers were answered with a yes, but even then I felt God's presence enough that I trusted that He had a purpose behind it. For example, I was a pretty lonely kid in elementary school, and I constantly prayed for a friend who lived in my neighbourhood and went to my school. I did strike up a few friendships in those years, but they never lasted long... A friend seems like a very reasonable request, and denying a friend to a child might seem to you to be a monstrous thing to do. But I can trace two major pieces of my identity back to those days and I think that both of them are very important. First, it really bothers me when I see someone being left out or excluded, and I often am keeping an eye out for ways to include marginalized people. Second, those years trained me to turn to God in times of trouble.
I would even say that my trust and dependence on God is even deeper than if He acted like a magical genie who granted all my wishes. A genie doesn't care about what is good for you, and once your three wishes are up, he's gone. But God desires what is best for us, and there is no limit to His provision and grace. But even more importantly, because God doesn't automatically answer prayers like a supernatural vending machine, there was more of a chance for a relationship to grow organically. Just as B had to trust someone enough to share her pain and struggles with them in order for trust to grow, I needed to trust God to have my best interests at heart. When the answer was no, instead of throwing a temper tantrum or giving up on God, I learned to pray for wisdom so that one day I would understand why. It turns out that a sense of the presence of God means more than the things I have asked for.
And, as I grew older, my relationship with God grew deeper, my prayers grew more sophisticated, and God's responses became more striking. Here are three examples.
On the last night of camp, B started telling me about how she didn't feel included in the cabin. It seemed to me that the other girls weren't deliberately excluding her. Instead, from the very beginning, B didn't really engage with them, and so the others soon gave up. So I talked to her about how friendship is a two-way street. In order to make a friend, you have to be a friend. In order to build trust with someone, you have to give them something to be trustworthy with. I talked to her about how it can be scary to open up and be vulnerable with others, but that is what you have to do if you're going to make a friend. But you can start with something small, and if that goes well, you gradually build up until you can trust the person with something bigger.
B was visibly upset, so after a while, one of the other girls came up and asked her what was wrong. B froze and didn't say anything. You could see the fear in her eyes. I gently suggested that this could be an opportunity to take a risk, be a little vulnerable, and see what happens. I don't remember exactly what happened, but I do remember it went well. B said how she felt left out, and the other girl reassured her.
I haven't seen or heard from B since that week at camp, but I do hope she is alright.
This story came to mind last night during the sermon at church. The pastor was speaking about what we take as proof that God exists. He asked us to consider what was it that convinced us to believe in God. For me, I cannot think of one big, defining moment that caused me to believe in God. Rather, much like how trust builds in a relationship, my faith in God was built little by little.
When I was young, my belief in God and my prayers were rather simple. I remember once, I couldn't find my homework, and then I prayed, and it was in the very next place I looked. Or my first summer volunteering at summer camp, when I was 14, and everyone was praying in a big group. When it was my turn, I was so nervous, but I prayed anyhow, and it felt so much better praying in a group than alone.
Even as a child, though, not all of my prayers were answered with a yes, but even then I felt God's presence enough that I trusted that He had a purpose behind it. For example, I was a pretty lonely kid in elementary school, and I constantly prayed for a friend who lived in my neighbourhood and went to my school. I did strike up a few friendships in those years, but they never lasted long... A friend seems like a very reasonable request, and denying a friend to a child might seem to you to be a monstrous thing to do. But I can trace two major pieces of my identity back to those days and I think that both of them are very important. First, it really bothers me when I see someone being left out or excluded, and I often am keeping an eye out for ways to include marginalized people. Second, those years trained me to turn to God in times of trouble.
I would even say that my trust and dependence on God is even deeper than if He acted like a magical genie who granted all my wishes. A genie doesn't care about what is good for you, and once your three wishes are up, he's gone. But God desires what is best for us, and there is no limit to His provision and grace. But even more importantly, because God doesn't automatically answer prayers like a supernatural vending machine, there was more of a chance for a relationship to grow organically. Just as B had to trust someone enough to share her pain and struggles with them in order for trust to grow, I needed to trust God to have my best interests at heart. When the answer was no, instead of throwing a temper tantrum or giving up on God, I learned to pray for wisdom so that one day I would understand why. It turns out that a sense of the presence of God means more than the things I have asked for.
And, as I grew older, my relationship with God grew deeper, my prayers grew more sophisticated, and God's responses became more striking. Here are three examples.
- My church, as I believe churches ought to be, is open to anyone, and as it is located in the downtown core, anyone really covers a quite a large range of people. One Sunday after church, a group of friends and I planned to go out for lunch together, and a subset of the group was waiting at the entrance of the church for the rest to join us. As we were waiting, a woman started ranting and yelling non-sensically in front of us, pacing up and down the sidewalk. She had been in church that morning--I remember because she had heckled the pastor mid-sermon--and she had apparently asked for and received a Bible. She was now ripping out handfuls of pages and throwing them to the ground. One of my friends approached her and tried to calm her down, to no avail, and another started following her around, picking up the loose sheets of paper she dropped and putting them in the recycling bin on the street. This went on for quite a while, except for a brief interlude when she wondered into the beer store on the corner. I didn't know what to do, so I popped around an outcropping of the building, leaned against the wall, and began to pray. As soon as she had begun, it had immediately popped into my mind that the woman was demon-possessed. But the rational part of my mind rebelled against that idea, insisting that it was probably mental illness. When I first started praying, I prayed rather generically for the woman, for peace in her mind, but the idea of a demon would not go away, so finally I gave in and prayed, if she is possessed by a demon, release her. Immediately, the ranting and yelling grew quiet. I stayed around the corner for a minute more, and when I rejoined my friends, she was gone. I asked them what had happened, and they said she had suddenly got a weird look on her face and calmly walked away.
- As many of you know, I am a PhD student. What you might not know is that I seriously considered turning down my place in the program. I applied to the PhD because the advice of the graduate student body was to apply anyhow if you weren't sure you wanted to do it in case you changed your mind. And I hadn't been sure. In fact, I was pretty sure I wanted to at least take a gap year and save up some money. And I certainly did not want to enter into the PhD program lightly. For one, grad school can wreak havoc on your mental health. I wanted to have a reason I could point to and say this is why I'm doing this so that when things got tough, I could hold onto that. For another, doing a PhD is expensive (in opportunity costs as well as tuition) and, by some accounts, it might lessen your ability to get a job--since it makes you overeducated and underexperienced--unless you are very clever at marketing yourself. When I was accepted to the program, they told us to let them know our decision as soon as possible, but they also gave us an actual deadline to decide by, three months out. So I decided to pray about it. I prayed for nearly the entire three months, until the week before the deadline. I was praying about it again--this time in church--and a thought came over my mind: what if I said yes? Immediately, I was filled with a sense of peace. So I accepted the program, and my one reason for doing the PhD became because God wants me to, which, it turns out, is more than good enough. But that's not the crazy part. Because I knew God wanted me in the program, I also knew that He would provide the resources I needed to make it through. And He has. Every year so far, I have been given a scholarship that goes above the minimum support that my university provides to their grad students. And two of those years, I have received a government scholarship that I was only eligible for because the rules changed right before I needed it. The second time, I became convinced that it was God working as soon as I saw the rules had changed, and sure enough, I was given the scholarship. This is a bit different than the other two stories I tell in this post, because I didn't even really pray for it, I just implicitly trusted that God would provide, and He has.
- In my first year of the PhD, I felt quite alone in my faith. Although there are other people of various faith backgrounds in the department, there weren't any from, let's say a born again type of background. Worse, there was this implicit assumption among my friends that any reasonable person would believe certain things and hold certain values and I didn't. Sometime in that first summer, it occurred to me to pray that God would bring another Christian into the program, in the year behind me. The set of incoming students had already been decided by that point, but I reasoned that God is not constrained by time and He is certainly able to answer a prayer before it is asked. So I prayed rather diligently about this for a few weeks--and not me only, a few others were praying for it too, along with me--and lo and behold, that September another Christian began the program. She has been a great encouragement to me!
Whenever people talk of God answering prayers, the skeptic in me wonders if it is just a coincidence. And, I have to admit, coincidence is a possible explanation for all of these scenarios. But it isn't really just things lining up that cause me to believe that God was behind them, but rather it is the context of relationship that really convinces me. In all three of these cases, I got a clear sense of God's direction before it happened, and in all three, I was brought closer to God as His plan unfolded. For every time I take a step of faith, God responds exponentially with blessings. And so my faith grows.
"Jesus answered, 'I did tell you, but you do not believe. The works I do in my Father’s name testify about me, but you do not believe because you are not my sheep. My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me.'" (John 10: 25-27 NIV)
Comments
Post a Comment