Going On Faith

I'm continuing to slug it out through Soul Survivor. Loving many of the chapters and barely squeaking through several others. Currently, I'm reading a chapter studying the life (and faith) journey of Frederick Buechner, many of whose works are found at Wheaton.

And, an excerpt I just read struck me more deeply than many others...Perhaps because it's a journey of faith we are on. Perhaps because I believe that regardless of our personal beliefs, there's got to be some sort of element of faith - believing in that which we cannot tangibly grasp or see - that gets us through each day. Perhaps because I believe that faith and hope are intertwined and one without the other is, in a way senseless. Perhaps it is simply because Buechner so accurately describes faith in a more abstract way than I have read recently...yet makes complete sense while doing so.

Faith is homesickness. Faith is a lump in the throat. Faith is less a position on than a movement toward, less a sure thing than a hunch. Faith is waiting. Faith is journeying through space and time.

So if someone (and this frequently happens) were to come up and ask me to talk about my faith, it's exactly that journey through space and time I'd have to talk about. The ups and downs of the years, the dreams, the odd moment, the intuitions. I'd have to talk about the occasional sense I have that life isn't just a series of events causing other events as haphazardly as a break shot in a pool causes billiard balls to go off in many directions, but that life has a plot the way a novel has a plot - that events are somehow leading somewhere.

-Buechner
- Going On Faith