D, W, A, V.

Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight. Do not be wise in your own eyes; fear the LORD and shun evil. This will bring health to your body and nourishment to your bones. (Proverbs 3:5-8)


          If the foundation isn’t right and strong, the building is going to collapse. If knowing God is the means of solving our problems, then prayer is vital. Faith and trust are the foundations of prayer. There’s a reason why this blog is called “Mission: Faithwalk.” Walking by faith is a “Mission: Impossible.” Faith is built on the foundation of trust. Both faith and trust have been major challenges in my life. Today’s reading of what E.M. Bounds says about them makes it worse. He claims they’re feelings, and that they’re of the heart. The heart? The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?  (Jeremiah 17:9) 
          E.M. Bounds grew up in the Romantic Era, a time when Rationality was rejected in favor of feeling[1]. I’m not sure that it was this time that planted the seeds for the notion that the heart is the seat of emotions, but it certainly fertilized the idea. Today, we accept this idea without question. In Scriptural times, the heart was the seat of the will. This leads me to question his application of Scripture that as matters of the heart, faith and trust are feelings. I think, rather, that faith and trust are soulical, involving mind (thought), heart (will) and bowels (feelings.)[2]
          Faith and trust are also abstract concepts. They are as real as real gets, but you can’t put them on a table and examine them. I can’t compare what I do with some objective, precise standard. Do I trust? Maybe, but I’m not sure and it’s probably not strong enough to hold up what I want to build on its foundation. It’s also possible that I have great and even awesome faith and trust, but that I am comparing my faith and trust to some imaginary standard that is a perversion of the reality. I don’t have faith in my faith or trust in my trust. 
          There is an area in which that last statement isn’t true. It’s an important area. I trust that God will guide me. I trust that God will provide wisdom, direction and attitude – the very things that I have been praying about most for myself the past couple years. They are also the things I ask others to ask for on my behalf. Is it any surprise that those three things are major components of faith and trust? 
          If I am going to get to know God better, however, the time has come to take a step. I started out praying about my attitude. Those are my feelings. Later, I added wisdom (thought) and direction (will). Another recurrent theme is that God would teach me to see with a photographer’s eye. That requires little modification to join the others. I want a “photographer’s eye” with respect to God. I want to become more aware of Him, to see Him in action, to be able to see and to share snapshots of Him with greater clarity. In short, I want vision, not visions, but vision.

---

[1] As a complete aside, I find myself wondering about the influence of Romanticism, which peaked in the first half of the Nineteen Century, and Impressionism, which followed it, had on Mr. Darwin and his theory of evolution. It seems to me that the allowance of speculation and the inexactness of definitions of terms like “species” could well be a product of those philosophical soils.
[2] Complete aside again. Perhaps this idea is how we developed the idea of “feeling in my guts,” “gut instinct,”  and “gut-wrenching.”