Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Let Go, My Soul, and Trust In Him


This is not an article about loss, nor grief, nor sorrow, nor numbness; as much as it’s an article about faith — faith, the resolution to believe that God can make all things anew, even out of the calamity of a train wreck.
Yes, that train wreck is the loss you suffered that rendered life, as it was, ended.
Only a new life could begin again after such loss. There was nothing of the old life without great travesties of emotion for what, indeed, was lost. You are not alone.
The song, It Is Well, by Bethel, is the perfect caricature of the fusion of faith in crisis.
Such a song can entreat the sense for possibility — to know, in the perishing depths; God provides at the behest of our letting go, to trust in him.
How does such a thing work as faith? I have no idea, but for the fact we are told to trust and all will be taken care of — to believe, and to know by experience.
Invariably we will have had to have learned once; this faith is a gift that cannot fail us. Invariably once we will need to suffer as if we were abandoned, but with the trust that believes differently. And that is the most resplendent faith; to believe beyond any retrieval of hope.
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May it never be that I can’t see,
That vanishing hope beyond all sight,
May it be that I’ll always agree,
To fight faithfully the good fight.
When we let go, not simply sufficiently, but completely, then our faith matches the abundance of God’s faithful provision.
Then, and only then, is our faith commensurate with the throwing of that mountain before us into the sea.
The best of faith is also its most desperate. We are only gifted with the courage to let go when we have nothing left to fight with. But we must still reach that decision.
To decide to let go and trust in God is a decision that never feels right. It defies our human wisdom. And that’s why faith works — it refuses and repels the folly of the flesh.
The courageous faithful let go when courage without faith suggests “hold on!”
Faith is a folly to the worldly wise. But wisdom relegates the worldly to folly because of a lack of faith.
Faith is a mighty tool in the hand of a person who holds life lightly.
© 2015 Steve Wickham.

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