Conquering the Need to Draw Back: Why We Always Come Back to Faith
Acts 17:27
God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. (NIV)
A couple weeks ago, I compared our journey through faith to the superhero sagas we see on the big screen every summer. There, I mentioned the moment when the hero inevitably draws back and considers giving up before plunging into the final battle. They become lost at the worst moment, with the whole world on the line, and only they know how to find their way back. In our own lives, we often struggle not with monsters like we see in the movies, but with understanding our limitations and how to proceed in life.
We’ve all lost faith at one moment or another. We’ve lost faith in ourselves and in those around us, in family and friends and coworkers, and even, for a time, in God Himself.
There’s nothing shameful in admitting that. Many of the greatest Christians in history have had such moments of despair and drawing back. They become great because they rose to the challenge and conquered that moment, not because they had it. We are not perfect, and we are all going to struggle to see God’s plan sometimes, particularly in the difficult moments in life. We draw back before the holy triumph, just as heroes on the screen do, struggling with a moment of doubt before returning to our mission.
Just like the heroes on our screens, we always do come back to faith. Why is that? What is it that drives us to return to the battle for our soul every single time?
In Acts 17, we find Paul explaining the true God to a group of Athenians, who “are ignorant of the very thing they worship” (17:23). He’s speaking with a mixture of pagans and Jews in the marketplace, the busy intersection of life, and he has caught everyone’s attention by explaining exactly why God created us. As we see in the passage at the top of this post, the reason was so we would “seek” Him, so we would “reach out for Him and find Him.”
Any person of faith knows that seeking is central to the identity of Christians. We seek God in all our actions, and beyond that, in all the actions around us. We seek God in the news and in our communities. We seek God in our families and in our personal decisions. Faith, in essence, is the seeking of God.
“Faith is the only internal guarantee that we have that helps us through a life of constant change. We are who
we are, no matter what, through good and bad–because of faith.”
–Excerpt from my book, Faith: Learning to Live Without Fear
Of course, like anyone seeking, we sometimes struggle to find what we’re looking for. Our eyes are imperfect, our vision of events is limited. In seeking, sometimes we look into tragedy or failure or poverty or death, and we simply can’t see God in it.
In such moments, we doubt. Like our superheroes on the screen, we have a moment of crisis. But, Paul has already told us how this ends. He’s already laid out the reason we can’t stay away, the reason we pick ourselves back up and start looking all over again: “He is not far from any one of us.” This is why we always come back to faith. God does not expect us to understand all His actions, nor to see Him in all His complex designs.
But He has made Himself so common in everything around us, we cannot help but return to Him eventually. If we can’t see Him in the lightning, we see Him in the rain, and if we can’t see Him in the rain, we see Him in the rainbow afterward. This is just another way of saying He is in everything. It’s our poor eyes that can’t always see Him, but He’s still there.
That’s how we keep coming back to God. Though we may fall short in one moment, it is in the very next that we find the answer. Just beyond a tragedy is another holy triumph.
This is why, when we see our heroes on screen, we never worry too much over their stumbles. We know the victory is just around the corner. We’ve seen this movie before. We know they will find belief again, and with belief will come the answer that solves it all, no matter how scary those villains look and how certain those villains are of their own victory.
So it is with God. Though we might draw back today, we know we will be witness to more of His glory again tomorrow. To conquer our need to draw back, all we have to do is seek, because God is never far away.
