Poor and needy

I misunderstood the meaning of faith for a very long time.

For so long, I thought that faith was something that I had to muster. It was a spiritual muscle of sorts that I had to tone.

I thought I had to hurry up and believe x-number of impossible things so that I could be in God’s good graces.

I grew up thinking that this is what it meant to be a Christian.

Little did I know that I had it backward.

The Psalm in today’s reading goes like this:

But I am poor and needy; hasten to me, O God! You are my help and my deliverer; O LORD, do not delay!

So there we have… us.
Poor and needy.
Not the spiritually sufficient ones.
But the ones in need of a deliverer.
Like, NOW!

Faith is not for the strong.
It’s for the desperate.

Even before Jesus showed up, faith was always about the work of God inducing us into being.

It was never about us doing the work or lathering up the beliefs so as to get in good with God.

It was about trusting God - something more than ourselves or any other human - to reveal how much we are (and have always been) unbelievably loved.

Faith isn’t about improving our spiritual, moral, or even professional CV so that God approves of it.

Faith is about trusting and relaxing into the irrational love that our Creator has for all of life - us being an integral part of this creation.

Grace & Godspeed,
Jonas