I Thought I knew God until I failed!

The words of one who either lost his faith or never knew what faith was about. To each one that believes in God finds that it isn’t when everything is just as we would dream until the road we are standing on slips away and we ask, “Where do I go from here?”

Once we graduate from early learning, through intellectual study or worldly experience, we find that the past lives of those we learn from had the same down-turns just like us.

Can any of us imagine what Jesus would encounter after he entered our world where he had to learn what human beings experienced with all of the doubters and disbelievers that were waiting to test him and his mission? When God “created man in his image, after his likeness,”(Gn 1: 26) he already knew the weakness this creature would have, but now he would share the enemies of faith that man has acquired.

The one truth of all humans is that without faith in God the future existence of each one will encounter so much doubt that it will be like climbing a mountain without the necessary gear needed to succeed. However, in order to reach the pinnacle of any challenge we must understand just what faith means to the unlearned.

Where does faith come from? Is it learned? Can it be purchased through experience? Or will it be the graciousness of God that allows us to become one with him and share in the divinity of his Omnipresence? God is a mystery as well as the definition of eternal understanding. We cannot understand his divine nature, but one day will share in his Trinitarian existence.

Trust is the one edict of God’s being that came to be one of us when sin promised to declare all of his creation not able to be saved on his own. The one attribute that promises failure is the premise of remaining in a prone position when we fall due to weakness. We may hear the words “Get up when you fall” as the ‘Just man falls seven times and rises again.” (Prv 24: 16).

Failure is not a graceful institution that comes as part of being human. But it does enter the mental and physical mannerism of the weakness humans learn through the lack of faith and believing that it is normal to become shamed when unable to learn from our mistakes.

As we rise each time we fall we find that the God who created us is right there to catch us and breathe into our consciousness that he never left us alone and the trust we believe in becomes our faith that keeps us moving in the life God has endowed each of us with.

It is here that failure is not weakness, it becomes the strength through the grace of Christ that is sufficient and we find power made perfect through weakness. (2 Cor 12: 9).

Ralph B. Hathaway