Our Stories Unleashed

Faith in the Unseen

Faith is a funny thing. Hebrews 11:1 explains faith as believing something we cannot see Yet I’ve found that, over time, my faith in God has become less of believing in the unseen and more of an experience of a pattern of faithfulness. I’ll try to explain.

A friend once suggested to me that faith is kind of like sitting in a chair. We confidently take a seat because we have sat in chairs so many times and they have held us. What’s more, we have watched so many other people sit in chairs. The chairs haven’t broken. We haven’t fallen. We get to where we trust chairs without giving it any thought because chairs have worked for others and for us so many times. It’s not so much that we consciously place our faith or trust in a chair. It’s more that our experience with chairs has proved to us that we can trust the chair without evaluating or reconstructing that trust each time.

So it is with my faith in God. I started trusting him long ago. Like all those chairs, God proved himself faithful each time. I’ve watched others – in scripture, in history and in my lifetime – believe in God and I’ve witnessed God’s faithfulness to them. Believing in God (the unseen), then, slowly becomes a personal history and narrative (the seen) that requires far less “faith” than how we initially understand faith.

A hazard comes when we find a bad chair. I visited a friend’s home where a group of us stood around visiting for a long time. After a while, one guest casually sat in a nearby chair… and it broke. She was embarrassed for having broken a chair, and the hostess tried hard to hide her displeasure at the broken chair. The hostess confessed that everyone in her family already knew the chair was broken, so they didn’t use it. They also didn’t fix it or make it obvious to guests that the chair was broken. Without warning, that guest’s confidence was shaken.

So what happens when we, as Christians, sit in a bad chair? I don’t mean a literal chair. I mean, what happens when we place our faith in God and the result isn’t what we expected? What happens when someone else misrepresents what faith in God is or should be? We must step back and evaluate things against scripture and God’s history of faithfulness. Obviously my friend who sat in the broken chair didn’t give up on all chairs after that experience. Her history with reliable chairs won out and, not surprisingly, she still uses chairs every day.