There is no shame in this needing each other; need is our greatest need. This is how we live the love story of our dreams. This is the way of all the epic love stories: Dependence deepens attachment. Vulnerably tying hearts to each other isn’t tying us down; it’s pulling us out. And this is true too: Dependence on God is what deepens attachment with God, and dependence is nothing less than a trusting that knows it can depend on the bridge to hold, for the arms to take our whole weight, for the heart to always open, for our person to be the One we can count on to take care of us the whole way through. Which is to say: Dependence is having faith. Need is our greatest need because need curves us in the direction of dependence, of faith. And there is no deep love without dependence, there is no love without faith; there is no love without being able to rely upon, depend upon, lean upon. This is what God seeks: hearts to have faith in Him, and for hearts to be faithful to Him. Deep calls to deep, dependence to dependence, hesed to hesed.
It is changing me, that
the Greek word for “faith” is pistis, which, like almost any word ending in is, refers to an ongoing, dynamic reality. A more accurate, though perhaps clumsier, translation might be “faithing.” Or perhaps we may translate it as “faithfulness.” In historic Christianity, faith is not understood as a single, absolute certainty, based on a one-time experience of salvation. [Faith] is an active, ongoing movement toward and with God.
Andrew Stephen Damick, Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy: Finding the Way to Christ in a Complicated Religious Landscape (Chesteron, IN: Ancient Faith Publishing, 2017), 172 (emphasis mine).
The whole of the Christian life is more than a single act of faith at the foot of the cross; the Christian life is a moment-by-moment movement of faithing toward God, with God, of trusting in God to take care of us, a depending on God to carry us out, to carry us deeper in, of faithing in God, which grafts our hearts to God. Faith isn’t a noun; faith is a verb; and faithing is an act, a journeying with no map but God alone. Faith is not being sure which way, but going always toward Him, in Him. Faithing is the journey of clinging trust.
Ann Voskamp joins Randy and Sheila this Wednesday on LIFE TODAY. Excerpted from Waymaker by Ann Voskamp. Copyright 2022 by by Ann Morton Voskamp. Used by permission of Thomas Nelson.
