Faith and Foosball

First off, I would like to thank everyone at Vanderbilt who has played foosball with me in the past. This list includes Drew Herrmann, Samuel Dobberpuhl, Jordan Ridge, Will Johnston, Charlie Billingsley, and Chris Ammerman. Thanks to you guys for giving me constant practice throughout the past two years because today I became a champion of foosball here at SYME. My teammate, Charity S, and I rolled through the 4 rounds of the tournaments and enjoyed the sweet taste of victory in the form of ice cream. It is a good day to be a champion.

Second, I would like to focus more on something I find serious. I want to discuss faith, because faith is the thought that is bouncing around my mind, trying to escape the confines of my skull.

As Paul writes, faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see (Hebrews 11:1). And I can say confidently that there are things I have faith in. “Cause there is faith, and there is sleep, we need to pick one please, because faith is to be awaken, and to be awaken is for us to think, and for us to think is to be alive.”

I have faith that seeking a Great Perhaps leads me to be more alive then I have ever been. I have faith that seasons will come, and every fall and spring, I will be in awe at the amazing colors and brilliant beauty erupting from nature all around me, from Vanderbilt to East Tennessee. I have faith that certain people will always catch me if fall, that list including, but not specifically to, Peter Kenneson, my Family, and Bobby Cannell. I have faith that conversations over coffee have magical components of connections, no matter whom it is with. I have faith in the goals, visions, and ministries of Midnight Worship, United Nashville, and Ethos. I have faith in Jesus, and I am madly in love with him. I have faith in his Spirit that was sent here and is moving constantly in powerful ways throughout this broken world. I have faith that God’s nature is good, holy, perfect, and love. His very nature is love, and his love is something I have passionate faith in. I have faith, but faith leaves me with the question: is it real faith unless you have been challenged and wrestled with what is on the end of this faith? So here I am in Taiwan, wrestling with the character at the receiving end of my passionate faith.

In Isaiah 61:1-3 it says:

The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor;
he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and the opening of the prison to those who are bound;
2 to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor,
and the day of vengeance of our God;
to comfort all who mourn;
3 to grant to those who mourn in Zion—
to give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes,
the oil of gladness instead of mourning,
the garment of praise instead of a faint spirit;
that they may be called oaks of righteousness,
the planting of the Lord, that he may be glorified.

And it is in these verses that you begin to see the very nature of the God we have faith in. It is the same passage Jesus would use in his ministry to discuss himself. In these verses you see a God, you see Jesus, who is passionate to help the poor, to comfort the brokenhearted, to bring freedom to those enslaved, to rescue captives from darkness, and so much more. It is this beautiful picture of God that flows from these verses, and it is even more beautiful to me when I recognize it is what Jesus says about himself. He is God and this is what he is passionate about in this world: good news, helping, healing, liberty, rescue, and light.

The thing is that in America, we have a tendency not to recognize all these qualities of Jesus, of God. We see and serve a God who brings good news to poor, and we believe in a God who binds up brokenhearted people. You see this in our homeless ministries, outreach programs, and small groups. We go seek to save the lost, because that is what Jesus calls us to, but rarely do we recognize the power and weight of a God who proclaims liberty to captives, who shines light in dark places where people are born. We taste and experience aspects of this, but we rarely live in it fully. Trust me, in no way am I saying that our focus on the poor and brokenhearted a bad thing. I am merely saying that we rarely have a need for a God who is actually going to free people and fight battles for us in dark places that are more then our internal problems.

But here I am in Taiwan, where there is a temple on every other block. Temples that are dedicated to gods that you would never hear of anywhere else, temples where you can physically feel a presence pressing in on you as you walk past it, temples that make passages from the Bible, like “each national group made its own gods in the several towns where they settled,” come to actual life, and my view of the nature of God is being shifted and stretched. No longer is he just a God of helping poor people and loving on those who aren’t usually loved, but he is a God who shines light in dark places. He is a God who fights against idolatry. A God who literally brings liberty to people in captivity, and as my view of God’s nature is stretched, the line connecting my faith to it is being stretched, twisted, and challenged.

What do you do when your faith is stretched and challenged? What do you do when begin to see God as way bigger then you ever imagined? What do you do when the stories you in read in the Old Testament suddenly begin to make sense because of the culture you are in? And where do you go from here?

As Nashville looms promisingly on the horizon, these are the questions I must face. But I know one thing for certain; one of my prayers at the start of the summer was that by the end of this summer, the summer of 2013, I would be afraid, amazed, and astonished by Jesus. And now as I wrestle with these questions, as my faith is challenged and grown, as my view of Jesus is expanded, I have begun to see Jesus answering that prayer all around me. And I can’t wait to see what Great Perhaps he takes me on next.