Sorry for the long lull in posts, I got married... :-)
Speaking of which, it taught me an important lesson about faith.
YOU HAVE TO KNOW IT WILL WORK OUT IN THE END.
The problem is, in the middle, it doesn’t always look hunky dory. The evil is still out there, it’s still floating around, it’s still running amuck, and it’s still affecting me. People die, G-d forbid. Little kids get sick. Families are torn apart. This world isn’t tearing at the seams – it’s bleeding at the seams.
And everything is supposed to be alright? I'm supposed to walk around like the world is a garden and everything’s beautiful? We’re supposed to skip off into the sunset saying “G-d will take care of me, no worries” as the road crumbles underneath us? That’s not faith, that’s folly! That’s the blindness G-d has been trying to remove, trying to get us to see the evil that’s there and grapple with it instead of just ignoring it and saying – it’s good, it’s good. It’s NOT good and we have to deal with that. G-d is probably tired of saving us from ourselves saying “it’ll be alright, G-d will save me.”
But how do you hold the two things together, and how do you know what to DO?
So fine, G-d is good, and all He does is good, and…we still have needs that aren’t met. We need jobs, we need money to pay rent, we need food, we need safety. We still only have so much energy and so much time. G-d is good up in His heavens, and He knows our hearts, and He loves us, and…we still need what we need!
That’s where faith comes in to tie the two things together. Yes, we need whatever we need, and right now, it’s actually good and it will be good once we get to the end of the story. Faith is what gets you through to the end of the story, when we see that all of the evil we thought was actually, inexplicably and yet understandably, good.
Knowing that, then we get to work to fight the evil we do see and try to fill the needs we do have, because believing it will eventually be good doesn’t mean we don’t have to do our part to try and make it good NOW.
