Faith In God
As I drove home one day this week I heard the end of a discussion on the radio. The speaker had, apparently, formed a representative body for Spiritualists, mediums (or should that be media?) and related practitioners, such as Tarot card readers and dream interpreters. Those who make predictions upon which clients can rely when making decisions about the way they run their lives. It seems they have fallen foul of the consumer protection laws and are being sued if the predictions do not come true and people make wrong choices based on them, often wasting money or losing face in the process.
We are not meant to know the future. Those who have gone before do not come back to give advice or tell where the family silver is hidden. Saul, violating his own decree against spiritualists, is the only person recorded as actually contacting a spirit with the help of the Witch of Endor – who probably did not belong to a union. What he learnt from Samuel, was definitely not to his advantage (1Sam.28:7-25). Knowing he was about to lose the battle did not allow him to prevent it, in fact it upset him so much he became ill. In all science fiction where time travel is involved the dilemma of the traveller is what to do or not do to prevent changing the past and thus the future. Does action or inaction cause catastrophe? We are not God, we cannot know.
I think we are overly worried about knowing what is going to happen. We seem unable to make a decision without a cast iron guarantee that it is correct. We constantly call for proof – scientific experiments with reproducible results. We do not trust in God. When we consider our brothers and sisters in countries where there is persecution they rarely know how the income for the next month will be obtained. They know Jesus tells us not to consider from whence our next meal will come or what we should wear (Luke 12:22) and that He says we should leave tomorrow to look after itself (Matt.6:34).
We are expected to have faith; faith that the right thing will happen if we do our best and follow the Biblical rules; faith that we will be shown the way. St John the Divine offers his view of the end of “the world as we know it” in the book of Revelation but that is just a tantalising hint, we have no way of knowing how it will all actually pan out. God’s physics and nature are so different from our three-dimensional world that we cannot conceive of it. We see miracles and healings around us and we do not know how they happened. What did it look like to see the loaves and fishes multiply to feed the five thousand (Matt.14:13-21), how does an inoperable cancer just disappear after prayer?
As we try to plan a future for NMEFC we need to have the courage to take that first step in faith. We do not know where it will end; we cannot see the whole picture yet. I remember being told that the way to eat an elephant was to cut it up into bite size pieces. This is what we have to do with the task of rebuilding the congregation. (Chop up the task, I mean, not the congregation, that would be counter-productive and against the law!)
