Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.
They were words that controlled us, like an electric fence to wandering minds and quaking bodies. The pastor repeated them to us frequently—at each hospital visit and in every triumphant prayer for healing within an oncology ward that seemed only to delve out the certainty of loss and the overthrow of control. His confident battle cry was so certain, so instructive: We will not fathom defeat; we will not even think about death. In the name of Jesus, we will see the evidence of healing though it is yet unseen. Despite a theology that under normal circumstances would have been bold enough to voice some very serious objections, I so badly wanted my dad to be well… So badly that we never spoke of his wishes for the funeral we would plan only weeks later.
Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen. They are the words of the ancient writer of Hebrews, though the way we used them during those short weeks with an aggressive cancer never actually considered this. It was a verse we treated as if it pertained only to us, jarred loose from its story and author and community. Once loose, we used it as a tool to jar my dad from his own flesh, from his pained and embodied life as a creature in his final days. We were after a miracle that would erase life as it had become, a healing that would restore us back to life before cancer. We used the verse, distorted into an individualized half-truth, to keep ourselves from considering anything more.
Sadly, the God many of these prayers envisioned was more like a slot machine than a sovereign, each prayer a spin that tried to muster hope against all odds, fearfully, as if dad’s life depended on the very quality of our mustering. While I don’t doubt the charitable intentions of those prayers—or the firm belief in a God who heals—I am saddened by the selfishness I didn’t want to see as I uttered them. The words we clung to were far more about the survivors than the dying one we loved or the abundant life we professed together in the crucified Christ—even in our own deaths. We clung to this creature-denying posture at the expense of a Christ-embodying posture, a posture that could have been both a sharing of my dad’s pain and a sharing of life and death with the one who holds both our lives and our deaths.
Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Sharing Life and Death
