Faith

My Hermione Granger energy is strong. Like the famous know-it-all from the Harry Potter series, I have big, bushy hair and an insatiable need to learn new things. I also love to be the person who knows the stuff. I remember walking into a library as a kid and becoming distraught as I realized I would never have time in my life to read all the books on the shelves. I love learning, and I have big “pick me” energy; and while I’ve learned to harness this tendency for good as an adult, I also see it driving some of my deepest insecurities and fears. I love to know things because I love having control. I need to feel like I have all the information so that I can be the most perfect version of myself, and so that I can help others become the best versions of themselves. The cycle is relentless, and since trying to know everything all the time is unrealistic, I often live my life tired and strained, always reaching for the next thing.

This all came to a head starting in 2023, when I spent time in Lebanon and in refugee camps, and then came home to teach English to newly arrived refugees and then find homes for refugee families being resettled in Columbus. That year kicked off a season of complete unravelling — there was so much to know, and I couldn’t take it all in. Not only this, but after a few years of confronting extreme poverty, I realized that there often weren’t any answers. The truth was that people fall through the cracks, and that it’s easy to turn a blind eye. I realized this even about myself: there is too much going on in our own lives to be bothered by those who are hurting the most. I was confronted not only with the world’s pain, but also the desire in myself to retreat from it. It took everything I had over the course of those two years to keep engaging, but trying to know and fix everything was killing me. 

At one point during that time I remember telling my pastor that my theology wasn’t big enough for the world I found myself in. What I was trying to communicate to her was that everything I had learned over the years, in pastoring and in life and through my studies in seminary, couldn’t hold a candle to the darkness I met in refugee resettlement. No theological framework, no commentary, no sermon was helping me get back on my feet. I had fallen into a valley that had no answers, only questions. Looking back, what I really wanted was the apple from the garden of Eden. The serpent looks at Eve and promises her that she’ll be “just like God, knowing everything” (Genesis 3:5). As I sat in the darkness of real life, all I wanted was to know enough to understand. I wanted to know the plan; I wanted to feel in control again. 

I am no longer working in resettlement, but I am still engaged in the world of refugees and immigrants, and I am still working out my faith with fear and trembling. What I am beginning to see, now, is that I am not going to know. There isn’t a book out there that can explain to me why people suffer the way they do, or why we willingly cause or turn away from each other’s suffering. And I haven’t just see the effects of war and hatred — I have also seen the bitterness and ethnic hatreds these wars left in the hearts of those affected. I saw broken people turn to racism and tribalism to try to heal their woes. I witnessed broken systems that re-traumatized already traumatized people. I also heard about these same people beating or leaving their wives, or refusing to sit next to someone on the bus because of that person’s skin color. If I tried to look for cut and dry answers, for heroes and bad guys, there weren’t any. Every system, every human, was a mix of good and bad intentions; everyone was just trying to get by. Nothing was simple.

After a few years of wrestling with this, it is becoming clear that my naïveté and idealism have not withstood the battle. I’m a different person that I was two years ago, and I grieve that. But I also don’t want to be that girl anymore, because that girl didn’t really need to have faith. “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see” (Hebrews 11:1). What I always wanted was to see and to know, but faith is about not seeing and not knowing — and believing anyways. Faith is keeping the end in mind: that God is weaving his Kingdom into this world, even if it is happening more slowly than I want. Faith is choosing to believe that God is in control, even when people seem to be falling through the cracks, and faith is what compels us to jump into those cracks — the places where people fall through — because we know that that is where God is. Faith does not live on mountaintops; faith is born in valleys. It is born in the places where the pain of this world becomes unbearable, and we are forced to reckon with what we believe. As I continue to engage in the valley, I am beginning to heal through one realization: God is present. Like Job, I do not understand, and I probably never will. But God is here in this valley, so I will keep showing up, and I will keep letting God’s story shape me, instead of trying to control the narrative myself.