Doubt haunts me.
It’s so frustrating!
It doesn’t make sense:
If we have an all-powerful God, and he wants us to believe in Him, why doesn’t he just show up?!
It makes me wonder if he has some sort of reason to not show himself to us.
Maybe it is because faith is a characteristic that God needs to grow within us and it cannot be taught or strengthened where it has no opportunity to exist.
Like we would never even know what walking was if we lived our whole lives floating in a space station. That’s like if we were born in heaven, with God right in front of us, we would never even know faith was a thing!
But on earth, when a parent wants to teach their child to walk, the parent sets him or her up against a table or something and then steps a couple feet back. Maybe that’s what God is doing. He has to step away from us in order to teach us to walk toward him. And without the distance between us we would never learn to walk. And if we never learned to walk we would never learn to run. If we never learned to run, we would never run along beaches or fly kites in the sunshine, or run marathons.
Well, maybe that is like faith. By teaching us faith, what other heavenly adventures is he preparing us for?
And we never would have learned it if he hadn’t stepped far enough away for us to doubt in Him.
Maybe that is the point of many of our struggles on earth. We would not learn charity where there were no poor. We would not know patience where things are not hard to endure.
Otherwise, we would stay babies forever in the things that really matter. And no good parent would be satisfied with that for their beloved son or daughter.
Raw Spoon, 6-10-16
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