A friend texted me in a panic yesterday.
She needed prayer—immediate prayer. An unexpected horror had occurred in her family, one that she was struggling to comprehend in real time, on top of several recent and very fresh griefs. I prayed for her and with her. This morning, I checked in on her. Monday, I know we’ll meet for coffee, and I hope the fellowship will help to steady her.
*****
Last week, a meandering conversation with an atheist colleague of mine turned to faith.
Atheists have many reasons for choosing their path, but in my friend’s words I hear echoes of hurt and disappointment. He feels, though he would perhaps not use the words, that God has somehow let him down, not been what he expected. Thus, he’s decided that there must be no God.
And yet. In his musings, he admits his own hesitations. “I want to believe,” he told me earnestly, “I just can’t.” Later, he confessed to being an idealist, to longing for hope—for himself, for his children. He listens to the faith stories of his colleagues and admits that sometimes, just a little, under everything else he tells himself, he thinks they could maybe be true.
We keep talking. I keep listening. I share my own experiences. I pray for him daily.
*****
She’s angry, this friend of mine.
She has—we both have—witnessed a great injustice being done. She believed in the inherent goodness and fairness of a process in which we were involved, and then injustice and wickedness won out instead. I know she has prayed over this: she is a practicing Muslim, and what has happened offends her values and mine.
We mourn together and lament together. She asks me how my God handles things like this. How my faith handles this. I tell her. She listens. She asks me to pray for the situation and for her, too. She tells me that she looks to my approach for guidance. I listen and pray as asked, and more than asked. I try to model peace and humility.
*****
The couple we know can’t go out any more.
They used to be the life of every party, dinner-planners and goers and doers whose hospitality brought friends far and wide to them. They were the makers of toasts, the givers of speeches, the planners of surprises. But age and disability have made their world a bit smaller, made them more tired and less able to spend evenings out with friends.
We make plans to “ambush” them with a surprise multi-course meal after the holidays, showing up at their house with everything for the perfect night out in a way that lets them keep both their energy and dignity.
*****
Sometimes, when I read about Christianity in Christian media—and even in secular media—I feel like I’ve entered a foreign country. Writers and podcasters and pundits debate over politics, over the relative holiness of AI, circle back to hot-button issues, ponder where the theology in x song is sound and the scriptural interpretations of y denomination or church.
The Christianity I live, daily, has little to do with any of this.
The Christ-following in my normal hours looks a lot like praying, and a lot like listening, and a lot like trying to meet needs or bringing people together to meet needs. It looks like still more listening, and long conversations, and check-ins, and stories from Scripture and from and from others about who Jesus is, what He has done.
It looks like trying to find the right Arabic phrase to convey a sentiment to my friend. It looks like bringing a big group of us together to split up pasta and salad duties for an Italian feast that will feed 20 people trying to watch a football game.
It looks like that dinner where we stayed too, too, too late because we talked forever and where the server started to feel like a part of our tiny group.
It looks like thinking about ways to share stories about grace and truth and love through art, and silly chats, and jokes, our own experiences.
It looks like a long walk alone, with God, while the last leaves cling to the branches.
It looks like my church’s tables collapsing under the donations for the latest food drive.
I don’t want to imply that it’s wrong to think or write or speak about the things I mentioned. I’m writing about faith now, here. But I think I, at least, give far too much energy and time to “Christian thought” rather than to living my faith. I will always love to read and think about my faith—God has often granted me the intellectual path, the path of study, as a way of approach to him—but I also must not neglect the impact of living it.
I think often of the Pharisees’ questions for Jesus: those pop-quiz moments where, on seemingly relevant social or cultural issues, they tried to trap him or hem him in. Jesus always looks past the surface question to the heart of the matter; he’s less interested in the debate than the motive. I don’t want to become Pharisaical in my approach either—to spend so much time asking God what He really thinks of AI that I neglect the work He’s sent me here to do. To focus on issues so much that I forget about people.
During a recent conversation, a Christian friend of mine confessed that the news was getting her down. “Politics and Christianity,” she muttered, “and all these things that I’m supposed to figure out—how God would think about them, or how I’m supposed to think about them—”
“Put the thinking away,” our second friend told her, “and just go help someone, for now.”
Thinking’s not wrong or bad. But the tendency to withdraw and try to think our way through everything, to noodle out the theological implications of every single issue, can be a particularly dangerous impulse for some believers. At the end of the day, rather than tie ourselves up in knots, it’s helpful to put everything away—and help.
The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few—and will be fewer if we forget we’re to be out there among them.
Samaritan's Song 