Fail-Safe Faith?

After reading my wife’s blog (entitled swinging) a couple of days ago I was thinking over the comments she made about failing in trying to open the maternity house. I picked up a book that I had been reading but had not had time lately and this was what I read:

We have been taught that whenever God is in something, there is no chance for failure. At the same time we are reassured that when God is with us, we are guaranteed safety. In the process we create the most ironic oxymoron – “safe faith”.

A fail-safe perspective blinds us to divine moments from several vantage points. We fail to see divine moments when all we see is danger and the risk of failure. We lose our confidence in the midst of divine moments when the journey becomes turbulent and God allows us to experience failure. And we are unable to celebrate divine moments, even after we’ve walked through them, if we look back and measure the success of the journey in human terms.

One of the advantages of the Bible is that it is predominantly a history book. We are able to look back and see what God has done. God’s history in the story of humanity gives us a foundation for our present and future faith. Yet it is also a disadvantage that the Bible is predominantly a history book. It’s like reading a book from the last chapter to the first. We know the ending of every story, even as we read the beginning. And beyond that we know the end of history, even as we live in the midst of it.

Whenever God is involved, the epilogue is not mysterious. God wins. Everyone on His side gets to share in that celebration. This is good news, but it can be terribly misleading. We think because the story concludes with a guaranteed victory, every chapter is lined with nothing but victories. We expect our journey to look like a trip on a rocket ship beginning from the launching pad and reaching to the highest heavens. In fact, it is better described as a roller-coaster ride with nauseating ups and downs. We do well to remember that even in battles that are counted as victories, the winning side has many soldiers who died in the engagement. And so while the nation has a story of conquest, victory, and freedom, the individual might have a substory of conflict, suffering, and defeat. It is only because his life is interconnected to the broader story that his death gains both meaning and victory.

~Seizing Your Divine Moments
~Erwin Raphael McManus


That pretty much says it all. There is a movie clip from We Were Soldiers that if you imagine that it is Christ talking to His troops (children of God) it says the exact same thing as the above. Check it out… www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechweweresoldiers7thcavalryaddress.html