What does faith look like?
Easy trust?
Absolute confidence in the Father’s love?
A sense of belonging at church?
A smiley face, even in the toughest times?
Unwavering, unquenchable belief?
Knowledge of the appropriate Scriptures for every situation?
…
Or maybe, maybe it’s desperation:
“A large crowd followed and pressed around Jesus. And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse. When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.” Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.
At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?”
“You see the people crowding against you,” his disciples answered, “and yet you can ask, ‘Who touched me?’ ”
But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”
Desperation on its own is a killer. If we meet it with fear, we end with despair. But if we take our desperation to God – it becomes something different. It looks like living by faith.
I don’t know if ‘desperate faith’ is an oxymoron or truely, if faith is desperate, because we are in a perilous or desperate situation from which to be saved. Maybe, we are desperate, and he is obliging. Therefore had we not better call it, obliging rather than desperate faith? So, if he knows our needs why do we get so desperate? I suspose i get desperate all the time, because i center my thoughts on myself and what i have or haven’t done (and that is never enough, hence the notion of greed or unsatiated(insatiable) desires) and by definition i am the desperate or imperiled one through to my core. Pure joy or peace is not an emotion I am frequented with nor i think can one expect it often. Joy like happiness is not, surely a state to be sought directly. So bring it on, a bit more grief and I shall presumably be made strong unless i let the yoke break me.