My sister has seven children ranging from 6 to 23. Her sixth child was perfectly normal until the age of 2 at which time he started having seizures. It was extremely difficult for the family but mostly for my brother-in-law (who is also my best friend). The nature of the problem was this.
All his adult life he had been more than exemplary in his Christian life and he believes with all his heart that God loves him. And he is deeply devoted to and loves God. He sees God as a father, just as Jesus taught.
Then this happened. I heve never seen a man more tormented but his torment was only partly because of his helplessness to heal his son. I think that a greater part of it was a sense of utter betrayal by God who did absolutely nothing to ease the suffering.
It is one thing to have a deity that demands obedience and worship. It is entirely different if you heave the label "father" into the list of God's attributes, however, because we all know what a father is and how a good father behaves toward his children. Perpetual silence and complete absence of intervention are not among those qualities.
My point is that my children have faith in me not because of something they have read but because of experience. They know me. They know that they are not going to go hungry. They know that when they make big mistakes (e.g. having a child out of wedlock) that I am not going to hold their guilt over their heads and that I will do everything in my power to help them. They know this because of who I have been to them and how I have acted in the past.
If I did nothing when they were in need and remained silent, it would not be right of me to criticize them for not trusting me or having faith in me. No amount of clinging to one's faith in the face of the obvious realities is helpful.
To my mind, faith based on someone else's reports about what a person is like is not really the kind of faith that matters. If someone told me that if I was ever unable to pay the bills that Kathryn would give me money, I'd say, "Wow. That's cool." I wouldn't doubt it for a second. But if I show up at your door and you hide from me or refuse to help me then of what value was that faith? None that I can think of.
I tend to believe that Danizar may be struggling because of these kinds of reasons.
Paul describes faith as "the evidence of things not seen" but very few people are capable of really holding to such a definition of faith. If we did, we'd never question whether George Bush or Ted Kennedy or Madelyn Murray O'Hare were good people or not. We'd simply grab an opinion and no matter what happened we'd still believe only the best (or worst) about those people.
Your children trust you to take care of them, but sometimes they cannot see the logic in your discipline and decisions, I'm sure. Sometimes in your parenting, you have had to administer rules or consequences that I am sure they haven't understood - but hopefully in the long run, they have seen the wisdom in your judgments in their lives.
My youngest daughter had a birth injury that caused her to have up to 40 seizures a day for the first four months of her life. Her doctors told me that in all probability she had cerebral palsy and would probably never walk. Believe me, I was ****** at God.
I was so furious and felt so impotent about this, that I could hardly sleep, hardly function. I remember specifically one night, somehow I ended up sitting on top of my washer, screaming at God and literally shaking my fist in his face.
But I had to reach a point where I acknowledged that God loves me, and loves my daughter, more than I can fathom, that He is infinitely just and infinitely wise, and I cannot fully grasp the depth of His wisdom. I had to come to a point where I accepted this - the point where I couldn't say, "Please heal my daughter!" because that might not be His will. I had to come to the point of acceptance of His will, whatever that will might be. Soon my only prayer for my daughter was visual - I prayed the image of laying my daughter in God's lap. Period.
It was only when I reached this stage that I could find any peace.
Now the really cool part of this story is that at the age of eight months, my daughter's seizures suddenly stopped. Within 6 weeks, she caught up totally in development and gained about three pounds. It was truly amazing. Her team of pediatric neurologists absolutely could not explain this recovery. In fact, at her final check up with them, when she was about a year old, the head neurologist actually chased us down in the parking lot afterwards, with tears streaming down his face, and told us, "I just wanted to tell you what this means to me - I see so much tragedy in my line of work. To watch this unexplainable healing take place has given me the strength to go on."
Now - maybe, just maybe, God allowed us to suffer in order to give this wonderful physician the little bit of encouragement he needed to continue his work for other children. I don't know. I may never know.
I had to get to the point where WHATEVER GOD DECIDED was OK - even if He decided that my daughter would be in a wheelchair the rest of her life.
That's what faith is in my book.
