Changing Course

           I know that my redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand on the earth. (Job 19:25)

 

“I believed,  until… (name that catastrophe.)” But, “There are no atheists in foxholes.” We sometimes seem to think that a great crisis somehow changes our faith. But when Job lost his family, his wealth, and his health, he maintained his faith. What made him an exception? Was he an exception? 

If we go back to Newton’s Second Law, and apply it psychologically, a person’s beliefs will continue in the same direction, at the same speed, and with the same intensity until or unless acted on by a larger force. A crisis should produce such a change. The problem is that we have only considered the force that pushes us off course, or, in the case of a direct hit, breaks us into many pieces. Another force acting on us is gravity: our own internal gravity that is the soul, and the external gravity of an even greater object, like the sun or God.

Even if we are thrown off course due to a sudden or overwhelming crisis, that does not mean that once the pressure is off, that we won’t return to our old course, or one similar to it. Job had a lot of forces working on him, but ultimately, he either didn’t change course, or returned to an improved, more correct version of his old course. The good thing about this is that it shows that we are not doomed to lose our faith when the going gets tough. This is the reason Scripture talks about enduring and persevering. The whole key is to keep going, but the truth is that we will tend to keep going as we have gone, even if that’s not the direction we like to think it was. We can either rejoice in this fact, or despair, and then apply our choice to this reality.

 Tomorrow, we'll return to the solution.