Life comes with no guarantees, but it is not the point of faith to make them!

The world often seems to be against us as the Covid-19 spread testifies. This perception can make it difficult for us to believe in an all-powerful God who loves us, is kind and has our best interests at heart. Belief in a loving God requires faith which is exercised by understanding the basic separation then between what happens to us in the world (which can feel hard and very difficult) and the belief that God’s love is real and protects and supports us. For me then, one of the big faith questions  (perhaps the biggest question) is whether we see the world and God as being against us or whether we are prepared, through faith, to believe in a loving God who is all-powerful and with us or beside us when we inevitably struggle in a world that can be hard and difficult?

I will now tell a story from my life which will, hopefully, show that if we don’t make this separation, it is likely that the very idea of an all-powerful loving God will appear as a cruel joke; given our everyday, normal experiences often feel very hard and difficult. The main reason I tell this particular story is because I think it offers a good metaphor for life in general and can be applied to many people’s circumstances, including ours now. It is also an example of me hearing, with no ambiguity, God speaking to me. At the time, this lack of ambiguity came as a complete surprise. Mostly, I hear God’s voice subtly and at a low volume, within the nooks and crannies of everyday experiences. However, at that time, it was one of the relatively rare occasions when God spoke to me loudly and clearly and where the voice was unmistakably his – that is, with a well-formed sentence addressed to me in the second person (you), from him in the first person (I or me). Of course, it is this kind of clarity and unambiguousness which made it surprising. It felt, unusually, like a voice from the outside ‘coming in’, so not part of the conversations or dialogue we often commonly have with ourselves.

I was in my late twenties, in South America. Our party of four was prepared to walk one of the Inca trails. We had enough provisions for the two or, maximum, three days the walk was supposed to take. We were carrying the appropriate camping equipment and were ready to follow the trail and enjoy the history of the country and continent, as well as the beautiful mountain scenery.

However, because of our inability to speak Spanish properly and without us being aware of the confusion, we were taken to the wrong end of the trail. This meant that instead of the walk starting with a day, at the most, of a hard, steep climb and followed by walking downhill for the rest of the journey, we landed-up walking uphill for over three days, finishing with about half a day downhill.

Even at that relatively young age, my body was not used to physical challenges and I had never been the type to welcome them, so this whole affair was a shock to my system, to say the least. Plus, the packs we carried were very heavy and the rain beat down most of the time. By the end, we had run out of food. Ironically, despite the rain, water was also hard to come by, and so we were reliant on the occasional stream we came across for replenishing our water bottles.

In these circumstances, when you are walking upwards, wet through to the skin, hungry, thirsty and unsure about how long this experience would last, but knowing that there was no option but to carry on, you have to ‘dig deep’, as they say. You stop speaking to the other members of the party and they stop speaking to you. You just trudge forward one step after the other, relentlessly, and lost in your own thoughts. And this was when God’s words came to me, out of the blue, as clear as a bell ringing in my head, and with him addressing me in the second person, from him in the first person. It was only one sentence, but in the form of a disarmingly simple question: “Why do you think I am against you?”

Even now, about thirty years on, I still laugh when I hear this question. My humour is often sardonic, liking comedy which comes from a place of doubt and even despair. Sardonic humour, for me, reflects an attitude of triumph over adversity and so often strikes me as quite wonderful. So, with the humour I enjoy, the situation I found myself in made this question from God all the more pertinent. The question sounded funny to me because it seemed, on the surface, so obvious why I would think God was against me. My response to him, as a result, could have easily been with another question – and then a rant:

Why do you think? I’ve been walking upwards for three days. I am tired, hungry, thirsty, and wet and you ask me why I think you are against me! You are supposed to be an all-powerful God who loves me and I end up, through no real fault of my own, in these barely tolerable circumstances which feel so difficult.

I could have responded to him in this way, but, thankfully, I didn’t. Instead, as soon as I heard his question, I saw exactly what God was trying to tell me – that to have faith in him, I must differentiate between what happens to me in the world and the difficulties which life inevitably brings, and what God does for me every day, every moment, in the here-and-now. In other words, I must believe and have faith and trust that he is always there for me, supporting me, loving me, whatever happens.

The flip-side to this, though, is that if I did not make this differentiation, I would assume that what life brings directly reflects whether I am loved and supported by God. Because life is often difficult, I am bound to lose faith in an all-powerful God who loves me and cares for me. This is because my ‘faith’ here is effectively being built on the sand of worldly circumstances. As Jesus said to his disciples in Matthew 7:24-27, when the winds come, the rains fall, and the floods rise, the house built on sand will inevitably fall down. Therefore, the sands of worldly circumstances can never be a rock to stand on, for, to use a contemporary expression: ‘life comes with no guarantees.’

Having this insight at the time, I could now laugh in my own circumstances for two reasons. First, without this separation between worldly circumstances and what God offers us, the very idea of a loving God becomes like a cruel joke, as life is often hard. Second, having made the differentiation, I am no longer defeated by circumstances, and so, knowing God’s love and support is always with me (even after my death where I will be in a blissful place with him and my loved ones forever), I can still face the world and what it throws at me, however difficult or grim.

This is not to trivialise the terrible pain, loss, and even horror many people have to live through, and as many millions do so now. Nevertheless, because our faith in a loving God is based on this differentiation, it helps generate an attitude of praise and thanksgiving, regardless of what happens in this world, which produces, I would say, a divine kind of laughter. Divinity is apparent when what happens to us does not determine our response to these circumstances. We are caught up in this other-worldly power which equips us with the ability to overcome such circumstances – and so to be joyful, loving and triumphant despite what is happening. 

The laughter is therefore born from knowing that nothing can touch us so much that we are wholly defeated.