Blog Church - Week 6

Today's sermon is called "Easy Faith, Hard Faith, & Mega Hard Faith."
Our week started out happy as my hubby and I celebrated 24 years of marriage.
Our week ends with great sadness because the precious little girl from our church in CA lost her battle with leukemia.
Tears flowed as I thought of all this family and their daughter had suffered over the past four years.
Then even more tears welled up when I read their last entry into her online journal which was posted just hours before her death:

"Please pray for Bailey. We are in the hospital and things are not looking good. We trust you Lord!"

That, my friends, is Hard Faith. It's choosing to have faith in the face of insurmountable odds.
Let me see if I can paint a mental picture to clarify the difference between Easy Faith and Hard Faith.

Let's say you have a very loving dad in whose love you are completely confident.
You are walking along the edge of a cliff. You are hand in hand with your dad, but you are walking right along the edge, so it's kind of scary. Because you know your dad loves you very much, you know without a doubt that he will NOT let go of your hand. You trust him completely. You are aware of the danger, but you are not afraid of the danger as you walk along the edge. You have faith in your dad.
This is Easy Faith. There's nothing wrong with Easy Faith, by the way. It just doesn't require much of you. Because of the situation, it is easy to keep the faith.

Now, let's say your dad says to you, "I'm going to go down to the bottom of this cliff and hold out my arms. I want you to jump off the cliff, and I will catch you."

When he gets down there, you can barely see him. You notice there's sharp rocks and some trees jutting out from the sides of the cliff. There's no place to jump where you can be assured you won't hit something as you fall.

Here's what each of us starts thinking at this point:
"Even though I know my dad said he'd be there to catch me, I don't want to go through the pain, horror, and terror of falling and possibly hitting things along the way. He didn't say that nothing bad would happen; he just said to jump and trust that he'd catch me AFTER the fall. By the time he DOES catch me, I might have suffered a heart attack and I might be bloodied from hitting rocks and trees on the way down. And... uh... what if he misjudges and doesn't catch me at all?"

Jumping off the cliff would require Hard Faith.

There's an even harder category of faith that I call Mega Hard Faith.
This is when you're walking along in life, and out of nowhere comes a gust of wind that PUSHES you off the cliff!!
This comes in the form of tragedy, disease, loss, injury, rejection, unfaithfulness, divorce, death of a loved one, and many other woes.
When this happens, your decision to have faith or not must come IN THE MIDST of the fall, as you're suffering damage along the way.
Being able to utter the words "I trust you, Lord," at this point requires Mega Hard Faith.
It isn't easy to trust when you're hurting and losing all perspective as you whirl and tumble and plummet towards the ground. It's easy to forget there's even anyone there to catch you.
You've been completey crushed, and nothing makes sense any more.
The unthinkable has happened.
Keeping the faith when you can't comprehend having the strength to face another day is mega hard, and there may be times that you give up all together. But, you always find yourself coming back to faith. Somehow, you manage to find a thread to hold on to, even when it seems all hope is lost forever.

This is what it means to have faith in God. No matter what life throws at you, you find a way to trust that He will be there to catch you.
This is easier said than done.
Having faith means that when all is said and done, and you've stood on the edge of your last cliff and faced your last fall into the abyss, you trust God wil be there.
You can choose to chuck the whole God thing all together which is what many have chosen for their lives. Or, you can choose to live life with faith in a loving God who promises to be there in the end.
No, I don't have all the answers as to why a loving God would allow terrible things to happen to even the most innocent among us. That's why faith is required, because we don't understand it all.

Faith is a difficult thing. The very essence of the word suggests its difficulty.

But where there's faith, there's hope.

I believe that after fighting leukemia for four of her eight years, Bailey is resting in the arms of God.
Her heavenly Father caught her.
Her parents and loved ones are still falling, just as we all are.

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Events are being held today in Bailey's honor. Her life has profoundly touched the entire surrounding area due to fundraisers and newspaper stories about Bailey's fight. There's a public viewing, followed by a service held at the high school gym in order to accomodate the crowd. After that, a graveside service, followed by a reception held at the high school. My hubby is officiating all events. It will be a long day with a mixture of extreme sadness and loss as well as great joy as Bailey's life is remembered. She was a remarkable little girl who touched many lives.
Today's events are what her parents wanted them to be...
A Celebration of Life.
And everybody said... Amen.