When Faith Feels Far
In 2014, my husband and I were finishing up school and had our sights set on Cleveland. With all the region’s rust and snow and diversity, we loved the city from afar and prayed one day that we wouldn’t be so far.
We moved in 2015. We packed up our 500-square-foot apartment in a pod, hearing tornado sirens that evening, and I was reminded that snow is better than tornado alley. My heart longed for the home we had not yet entered, the home outside of the Bible Belt.
We came into a church that was dying, hoping to inhale deeply, then breathe out new life. I knew that this would be the hardest thing we could choose to do. We anticipated the loneliness and imagined the painful rejections. We could never have foreseen being forgotten. If there was something else that we could have done, something that would have still allowed us to be obedient, we would have chosen that. But Christ’s Bride needed help in a little suburb of Northeast Ohio, and we couldn’t turn a blind eye.
In the months leading up to our departure, we were told by professors, coworkers, and mentors to “just preach the gospel, and people will come.” But the gospel is not a formula, and the sum of its parts don’t always equal a growing church. In our case, growth has been more than slow with frequent pruning.
We cling to the gospel, hanging on to every word breathed from the mouth of God, but four years later we’re still a church of twenty people. On a good day.
FAITH DEFERRED
I have spent four years now staring down my faith to discern its size. Is it a mustard seed, or smaller? Have I planted it in the ground, or have I hidden it away? Did it fall out from my palm, or did someone steal it when I was busy looking at row after empty row in our sanctuary?
I’ve never felt smaller, or more fragile, or weaker than when I have come to grips with what I see before me: a dying church, a church I love, a church that won’t quite grow despite the tenderness with which we care for her.
I started 2019 believing that some major cosmic shift would have to take place within our church for us to still be here by the year’s end. But now, in 2020, I’m realizing that’s not the case. I don’t feel stronger today than I did a year ago; I feel weaker. I don’t feel the church is getting better; some days it feels it’s getting worse. Nevertheless, I’ve been determined not to look at the empty pews to analyze our obedience. Instead, I look for evidence in my calloused hands.
I first came to Northeast Ohio when I was eighteen, and it wasn’t long before I was convinced of the need here. The need for people to love and tend to the hard soil; the need for churches to simply disciple; and the need for profound affection of the city. As a still maturing Christian during this time, I became focused on Mark 8:23–24:
And [Jesus] took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the village, and when he had spit on his eyes and laid his hands on him, he asked him, “Do you see anything?” And he looked up and said, “I see people, but they look like trees, walking.”
FAITH CONFIRMED
In Jesus’ ministry, he encountered scores of people, healing lepers and saving thieves along the way. When he encountered the blind man in Bethsaida, his compassion looked different. Spitting on the blind man’s eyes and laying his hands on him, Jesus asks if the man saw anything. The man did see; he saw people walking around as trees. Jesus placed his hands on the man’s eyes once more, and then the man saw clearly.
My eighteen-year-old self wondered why Jesus had to try twice to heal the man. Now I look toward the man with sympathy, wondering how hard it must have been to be honest that he was only half-healed and could only half-see. Some commentaries posit that this is a cautionary tale in faithlessness, but I wonder if it might also be a wink of solidarity to readers whose faith is war-torn 2,000 years later.
As I’ve worked in a dying church, I’ve had to look honestly at what’s before me. Sometimes I can’t seem to make sense of it in light of what Scripture says to be true. I often look around and cannot reconcile my sights with the encouraging tropes that fellow Christians send my way. I have to be honest that sometimes I can’t see that Christ loves his church, at least not the one to which I belong. Sometimes I can’t see that his kingdom is growing, nor can I see that he’s working things together. I see only half-truths, and I become only half-brave and half-faith-filled in light of them.
When I am honest about how chaotic the past four years have been, God meets me there because the Bible isn’t only Romans 8:28 or David slaying Goliath. The Bible also tells us of Jeremiah being thrown into a pit, Ezekiel being widowed, and Jesus being sealed in a tomb.
Christians do not suffer equally, and measures of faith are given to each of us. We are expected to steward the suffering and the faith diligently.
God can and does use our faithlessness to draw us into himself. Maybe the blind man’s faithlessness played a role in the story. Or maybe it didn’t. Nevertheless, the man was honest with Christ. The blind man participated in the growth of his own faith by revealing that he remained unable to see. He was candid that he wasn’t healed like the hordes of others Jesus had touched.
And Jesus didn’t leave the blind man to forever see crowds of people as forests. He led him into perfect sight.
FAITH REFINED
There have been many seasons when I become so entrenched in doubt and faithlessness that I refuse my words to God altogether. I’ve thought that if I can’t say rose-colored things to him, then I shouldn’t say anything to him at all. And if I can’t see the silver lining, perhaps it’s better that I am altogether blind.
Tending to the bride of Christ is no simple task. Churches crawling with vipers might grow and prosper while churches that seek first the Kingdom of God might fail. Ministers sly as foxes might gain recognition while there are workers whose faithfulness will be ignored for fifty years. Some churches might die, and some things (maybe most things) will never make sense.
But there is hope for us who only see trees right now. There is benefit in these foggy days where a church seems to be dying despite our hardest labors. The hope doesn’t rest on me to conjure up—the hope rests on the fact that the Kingdom of God is ever-growing and shaping, even if it’s invisible to our fuzzy eyes.
Jesus’ compassion for the blind man reveals the partnership between honesty and faith. I’ve found it to be far more sanctifying to be honest with God and let him do the work of healing and give the gift of faith as he sees fit.
I come to Christ often, telling him about the devastation I see around me. I tell him that I can’t see him, though I’m desperate to. And I tell him my faith seems fractured, because those around me don’t seem to wrestle with trusting that he is good.
I have yet to experience him radically transforming me in a moment. But I sense that the trees around me are slowly, yet surely, turning into people.
Sarah Morrison lives in Cleveland where she and her husband work in a local church revitalization. Her days are spent reading widely and writing thoughtfully. She loves dogs, hates coffee, and enjoys beekeeping. You can follow her personal writing on www.morrisonquill.com.