Paradigms

I ran in long sleeves and long pants this a.m. Fall is here and winter is coming, which means another year is nearly over. Everyone is talking about how fast the year has gone, just like they do every year. It's amazing to me how some days can seem so incredibly long (like when I'm teaching for 12 hours straight) while, at the same time, a year seems to fly by. How can both be true? But life is full of paradoxes, of truths that seemingly contradict each other.

One of those truths has to do with faith. How can God be both of a God of love and grace, yet allow so much evil in the world. Why doesn't he intervene now and make things right? And yet every now and then, we see evidence of an opposing truth -- God really is still in control.

I just finished reading Heart for the Harvest: Stories of Vision, Faith, and Courage by Jeff Farmer and Andrea Johnson. One story that amazed me was that of a missionary couple who planted a church in India, yet somehow that church became totally disconnected from the Open Bible Church that had supported the missionaries. Years later, through a divine coincidence, an Indian pastor connected with Open Bible leaders. . .and the leaders learned that the single church plant in India had grown to 61 churches. Unseen by the mother denomination, the Open Bible movement in India had kept growing.

The book holds similar stories of leaders sacrificing for something they believed whether or not they saw results from their efforts. It also tells the rest of the story -- the stories of what happened after the years of sacrificial effort. And in so doing, Heart for the Harvest instills hope.

There is so much that we don't see. That is the essence of faith -- believing in spite of contradictions, believing in spite of what seems so obvious as we walk in blind faith, believing in spite of seemingly opposing paradigms. Sometimes we get a glimpse of God at work, as did the leaders of the Open Bible movement; the rest of the time we live by faith, knowing in our hearts that God really is working behind the scenes, even during the times when we can't see it.