Faith

Right now, it is late at night. I can't really sleep. Too much is on my mind. I count the days since I found out the heart-breaking news about our baby, and I cannot believe it has only been 5 days. I could swear it has been 3 weeks. I have been through so many thoughts, so many emotions. I have to be honest here and admit that I've had very real doubts; doubts about God. Doubts about His faithfulness. Certainly doubts about my faith in Him. I suppose anyone in my shoes (and again I have to be honest and realize that some people have been through much worse) would have to sit back and re-evaluate what they really believe. The mind has to come to some sort of SOMETHING that makes sense, and trying to grapple with something that has no answers is a very vulnerable and frustrating place to be.
And after these very intense days of agonizing and.... oh, there is no word I can think of to describe the sadness,... it suddenly came to me. Faith. If I were to hold on to "faith" as some sort of guarantee that nothing in life would give me pain, it would be nothing more to me than some sort of good-luck-charm. And I would go through life and discover and discard hundreds of good-luck-charms and never find anything that would make life pain-free for me. That is why so many people become irritated with God (as I have done), feel betrayed by Him, (as I have felt), and walked away thinking, "God doesn't care after all," or "God doesn't exist." And truthfully, every single person who has lived, is living, and will ever live on this earth, WILL go through pain. All of us; no one is exempt.
The hard fact about Faith in God is that it can't even really begin to exist until you put it up against pain, against tragedy. It doesn't even become truly birthed until the day comes when your world gets rocked, shattered, broken beyond recognition -- I know this happens on many different levels for different people, it is not the same hardship for everyone-- That is when you decide to have Faith, that beyond what you can understand, in spite of what you feel, in spite of the doubts that you are tempted to listen to, that God is doing something beyond what you can see at the moment, and it is also probably far bigger than you realize.
Holocaust survivor, Corrie ten Boom, wrote a poem about a tapestry. We on this earth see the underside of the tapestry of our lives. We see criss-crosses that don't make sense. They actually look downright ugly. We see the knots. They look hideous. What are they there for? We think we see a pattern to emerge and then it stops. What happened? We are so easily tempted to think, "Doesn't God know how ugly this looks? This is a mess! All of these things break my heart, and I'm supposed to have faith in Him?!" Most of the time, He really doesn't answer more than, "Yes. I love you so much. Trust Me, that what I am doing is beautiful. Hang in there. I am with you every step of the way." And that is all the answer we get.
Finally, the day comes when we see everything from His point of view. We see the upper-side of the tapestry. And it takes our breath away. It was more glorious than we could have possibly imagined. All of the knots make sense now, all of the criss-crosses have meaning. Never would we have guessed that His purposes were so loving, so glorious and so beautiful. How could we have ever doubted His intentions towards us? But He knew the whole time.
And that is Faith.