Faith By Faith

Today was the ominous find out about the biopsy day after having a colonoscopy done last week.  The surgeon was worried about some scarring but as it turns out it’s only scarring with a little ulcer thrown in.  No cancer, not even a hint of it.  Nothing to start writing my will over.  Hallelujah!  Praise the Lord!  He is good!  Time to enjoy the summer and my place in God’s world.

God’s healing requires faith because you can’t see it coming and you sometimes don’t feel it has arrived.  You just have to know and believe it to be true.  And you have to accept the form it comes in, because it doesn’t always come the way you want it to.  I am amazed every day that I stand above ground, able to work in God’s Kingdom, yet others are taken home as their measure of healing.  He is still the awesome God of the wilderness, the loving Savior who drew children to him like rainwater.

For the longest time I though I had to have the miracle now; after all, he is the God of the impossible.  I wanted signs and wonders.  What I got was a slow path through the wilderness of chemo and radiation treatments, surgery, and more doctor visits in one year than I’ve had in my entire life before then.  Sometimes in order to get our faith to ignite we have to do the slow burn.  Often our leap in faith comes with small steps from one situation to another. Spirituality takes time to grow.

We look to Jesus to perform miracles, wonders, and signs when we should be asking him to forgive us and show us how to walk in faith for his Kingdom.  I used to think that my needs were too small for God to worry about, my situation too insignificant for him to care about.  Now I know the truth – he cares about every aspect of my life – he just sometimes doesn’t answer my prayers and supplications the way I expect him to.  It isn’t that God isn’t listening, it’s just that sometimes the answer is no.

Living a spirit-filled life challenges us to do the impossible for God, even when we know we’re the weakest link in the chain.  It gives us the impetus to go forward and walk the path set before us, even when we don’t necessarily feel or see God on the path.  He’s still there.  He hasn’t left.  He’s giving us room to meet him and walk with him, to learn more about his ways, and to do more for him than we ever thought possible. Even when the gauntlet includes cancer, going through the fire is worth it, because in the fire we are purified.  At no time in my life have I been closer to the Savior than during the storm the word “cancer” causes.

Of course, there are times when I will fail, fall down, get broken, sidelined, off track.  But God is always there to rescue me and bring me back to the path.  Hopefully, I’m a little wiser for the wear and tear.  Hopefully, I’ve learned the lesson God had to teach me.  Hopefully, I won’t let a failure become the litany of my life.  Because there is a God, there is always hope.

I’ve met a lot of folks who want positive proof that God exists.  My question is, how much proof do you need?  Does God have to perform miracles every day for you to see him?  Not me.  I walked out on my deck the other day and discovered an absolutely beautiful, deep purple clematis growing around the railings.  How it got there is God’s work.  I didn’t plant it. Neither did my mother or anyone else in our family.  I suppose you could claim the critters thought it was a nut and planted the bulb for me.  But I believe God placed it there just for me.  It’s not a miracle, just a pretty flower blooming on my front deck.  It means the world to me because God is in the growing of it.

After finding the clematis I got to thinking about a couple of other strange occurrences.  Last year, just as I was finding out about the tumor, my mother and I happened to see something odd in the side yard.  When we got out there, we discovered an entire carpet of purple crocuses decorating the side yard.  You couldn’t see the grass or leaves for the purple.  I had some flower beds near there, but I hadn’t planted crocuses in them. The ones I did plant were in back of the house and were white and yellow. So how did all those purple crocuses get there?  It would have taken an army of squirrels to plant that many bulbs thinking they were nuts for winter storage.  Who else but God could create a carpet as beautiful as that?  Like I said, how much proof do you need?

Then this spring, just as I was setting up appointments to monitor the tumor area with CT scans and a colonoscopy, I happened to notice the lilac bush by the side of the house.  I’d planted it years ago and it had never ever bloomed.  This year it did, in a glorious shade of purple.  And then there’s the iris out by the shed that has always come up but never bloomed.  It bloomed this year – in a deep shade of purple.  I think God is trying to tell me something.  I think I’d better pay attention.