(This entry is rated RAW.  In other words, I don’t have time to make it sound pretty or to cook the words so that they’re more palatable to you.  This is what I think.  It may not be right.  It may be informed by more emotion than would be helpful, but it’s where I’m at. If you’re not up for that, you should leave now.)

My birthday is this week, and so I’ve been in a reflective mood the past few days.  As I’ve reflected, I had a sad realization:

This is the year I lost my faith.

Yes, you read that right.

It has been a difficult few years for me personally and professionally.  I went through a stage where I seemed to shed nearly every mentor and encouraging person I’d acquired in the first 30 years of my life in favor of those same people openly attacking my life and my character.  That began around the same time that my responsibilities in my life ramped up–where I became a father, where I stepped into a variety of leadership roles in my working life and my local church.  As has been the case at other points in my life: when it would’ve been most helpful to have support, I ended up with less support, having to clean up the mess after various bad situations.  But even the previous couple of years before my 38th trip around the sun didn’t destroy my hope, despite the difficulties.

This trip around the sun changed all of that.  This is the year…

…that I lost faith in my nation and its people.

We can’t even agree that hurting people is wrong if the person being hurt is someone who doesn’t agree with us about absolutely everything.  We refuse responsibility as a nation and place blame instead.  We immediately make tragedy a talking point in our larger arguments.  We obliterate truth in the name of winning, not realizing that sometimes losing and telling the truth is better than stealing a “W.”  We ignore those damaged, wounded or destroyed by the powerful as long as we get a pledge to share in the power acquired and disbursed.  We ignore the unpopular or oppressed or sick or disadvantaged as it suits us and our preferred narratives, the truth and the disadvantaged be damned.

…that I lost faith in our politicians to do anything sensical.

I have always believed in the American system–that its structure would prevent the worst outcomes.  I have identified as a conservative because I believed it was the viewpoint that best accounted for the fallenness of humanity by counting on it and banking that people’s greed and self-interest would in some ways cancel out and prevent the worst evils.  I have long since given up hope on counting on men’s best impulses when it comes to governance.  But in this past trip around the sun, the extent to which conservatives sold out their own arguments to consolidate their power has finally become clear to me.

…that I lost faith in my heroes to do the right thing.

I have watched people I deeply respect in many areas of my life, both public and private, defend ideas and behaviors I never would’ve believed possible.  They have always been human, but their humanity (and the concomitant brokenness that goes with that) was something I wanted to believe they were capable of transcending.  This year, that naivete was shattered, painfully and repeatedly.

…that I lost faith in our journalists, who purport to be our truthtellers, to actually tell the truth.

The fifth estate has had a rough decade.  I know there are many good journos out there, but so much of what I see being bought and sold as news and journalism is nothing more than propaganda with an astonishingly thin veneer.  Social media has not helped in this regard.  Facts aren’t partisan, but the people peddling them are sure trying hard to convert them forcibly and publicly.

…that I lost faith in humanity to be reasonable.

There has always been a number of people with whom it is impossible to reason–a group allergic to logical thought.  It never seemed to me to be a majority.  It seems far more than a majority to me now.  I have joked recently that if the people around me were forced to choose a word for my tombstone, they might choose “reasonable,” and they would mean it as an insult.  Perhaps it is just that the reasonable folks are keeping their heads and not screaming and emoting into the void?  But at this point, the billboards for the worst of our nature as displayed in our discourse are everywhere.

…that I lost faith in my community of faith.

I have worked in my current job for Seventh Day Baptists for more than twelve years.  Until this year, I always believed that SDBs would be able to turn around some of the negative patterns we’ve set for ourselves and do something really positive for the Kingdom of Jesus Christ.  I never doubted.  I worked with absolute conviction that our people–by all accounts, good people–would step up and do the right things when the time came.  This year, I went from absolute conviction, to questioning, to faint hope.  As it stands, I have real questions if what I’ve spent the last 12 years doing was a good investment of my time, and if it has any chance to stand long-term.

…that I lost faith that the people who taught me the faith would do what they taught when the chips were down.

I have a wonderful local church which has been filled with earnest people who love Jesus.  It is not a perfect place.  For my entire adult life, there are things I believed were unfortunate scars on the face of my church.  But those scars were mostly healed–wounds from some distant time prior to my conscious memory.  In this last year, my church has proved the wounds weren’t only scars on the outside.  There were deep wounds on the inside which hadn’t been fully treated.  Sadly, as the hurts were exposed, most of us weren’t ready to really deal with the issues in a way that is consistent with the faith we profess, and as a result, the church has suffered.  I have more to say about this, but it will suffice to say that for significant portions of the last couple of years, my home church has been a painful place for me, and part of that pain is that we have not done as our faith dictates.  That’s not me pointing a finger at one person…it’s me pointing a finger at us, including me.  Right now, my faith home hurts.

…that I lost faith in my family.

This year, I got a view of what happens when families break.  So many people I know have experienced this that I feel stupid mentioning it as a nearly 38 year old man, but nevertheless, it is what it is.

…that I lost faith that my friends would be there with me to grow old as we worked through life together.

It’s been a year of relational catastrophes, from friends having inexplicably tragic fatal car accidents to garden-variety relational breaks due to neglect.  But the net result of these events has been that people who have been long-time residents in my life aren’t there.  I relied on these people for so much, that the losses here are unspeakably painful.

…that I lost faith in myself to do the right thing.

To do the right thing, you have to know what it is.  As the bombs continue to fall, I confess that I don’t trust myself to make good decisions in this shellshocked, gobsmacked, blinkered state.  Beyond that, some of the situations in my life now are so complicated and fraught emotionally that I have no idea what the right thing is.  At this point, most days I feel like standing mute, slackjawed, and just wondering at how exactly I found my way to this place.  I have spent time depressed, and this is like that in some ways, but in other ways, it is very different.  I haven’t given up all hope–this isn’t despair.  But somehow, that almost makes me feel worse, not better.   When I was depressed, I had a sense that things were still good somewhere, I just couldn’t figure out how to get there.  I knew I wasn’t seeing everything, but couldn’t figure out how to see.  Now, I see plenty, but what I see is what is discouraging.  If it makes any sense, this thing I’m in is external, where my previous bout with depression was internal.

 

That’s a lot of faith to lose, friends.

And as I survey what I’ve lost this year, it seems that I’ve lost nearly everything that used to define me.  Nearly everywhere I used to draw encouragement and hope has fallen to ashes.  As a result, I’m not sure I know what I am any more.  If that’s a birthday present, it is wrapped in peculiar paper.  And yet…

I can’t shake the feeling that in the midst of this loss, there is at least one thing I haven’t lost.  At this point, in my broken world, there remains one thing I haven’t lost.  God isn’t gone.  He isn’t absent.  I have felt God powerfully stirring in me this year, to remind me that I’m not alone, that I don’t have to be perfect, that the governments and denominations and churches and friends and families aren’t all there is in our world. And I know that as this all falls around me…as the bombs fall and the shrapnel flies, God can still do a thing in this broken and depressing lifescape.  He has done much more with much less.  In the end, I think it may be better for me to have nothing but my faith in God.  My little family is somehow managing to grow in our faith in the midst of all of this.  We don’t have as many people to do life with or places to process it as we used to, but we’re still in tact.  My wife and little people…we’re hanging in there, and God has been faithful to us.

If something good happens in this next trip around the sun, I won’t have any questions about how it happened or who did it.  There won’t be anyone else to give the credit to.  In the end, I lost a lot this year.  But there’s one thing I still have…hope in the God who saves me and delivers me.  And hope does not disappoint us.  If you’ve lost faith this year, I hope that you found some of your faith, like mine, was misplaced, and you’re investing it where it belongs–in our Lord Jesus Christ.

Romans 5:1 Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. ² Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. ³ Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, ⁴ and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, ⁵ and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

⁶ For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. ⁷ For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— ⁸ but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (ESV)

 

Listening to: “In the Night” by Andrew Peterson