Bri K

I read some words of C.S. Lewis this morning from an essay entitled “On Obstinacy in Belief.” The words struck me as it seems that he articulates my journey this year; my journey for life I suppose, but unmistakably this year, even this moment. These past few weeks the Lord has been revealing what this year has been about…a question at least half of my heart has been wrestling with in the absence of any tangible proof of its worth or accomplishment. I’ll share more in a coming blog, but for now, I’ll allow his words to stand powerfully on their own:

“There are times when we can do all that a fellow creature needs if only he will trust us…In getting a frightened beginner over a nasty place on a mountain, the one fatal obstacle may be their distrust. We are asking them to trust us in the teeth of their senses, their imagination and their intelligence. We ask them to believe that what is painful will relieve their pain and that what looks dangerous is their only safety. We ask them to accept apparent impossibilities: that to go higher and onto a more exposed ledge is the way not to fall. To support all these incredibilia we can rely only on the other party’s confidence in us–a confidence certainly not based on demonstration, admittedly shot through with emotion, and perhaps, if we are strangers, resting on nothing but such assurance as the look of our face and the tone of our voice can supply…Sometimes because of their unbelief, we can do no mighty works. But if we succeed, we do so because they have maintained their faith in us gainst apparently contrary evidence…

If human life is in fact ordered by a beneficient being whose knowledge of our real needs and of the way in which they can be satisfied infintiely exceeds our own, we must expect a priori that His operations will often appear to us far from beneficient and far from wise, and that it will be our highest prudence to give Him our confidence in spite of this…We trust not because “a God” exists, but because “this God” exists…For the question is not about being helped out of one trap or over one difficult place to climb. We believe that His intention is to create a certain personal relation between Himself and us…complete trust is an ingredient in that relation–such trust as could have no room to grow except where there is also room to doubt. To love involves trusting the beloved beyond the evidence, even against much evidence. No man is a friend who believe in our good intentions only when they are proved. No man is our friend who will not be very slow to accept evidence against them. Such confidence between one man and another is in fact almost universally praised as a moral beauty, not blamed as a logical error. To believe that God-at least this God-exists is to believe that you as a person stand in the presence of God as a Person. You are no longer faced with an argument which demands your assent, but with a Person who demands your confidence!

There would be no room for trust if demonstration were given. When demonstration is given what will be left will be simply the sort of relation which results from having trusted, or not having trusted, before it was given.”