Every now and again I get on my soap box and get accused of preaching so tonight is one of those nights. The Bible states in Hebrews 11: 1. "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."
In my life I'm still learning this lesson for I am but a babe and oft times my vision in life gets cloudy but let me give you a couple of examples of how faith has manifest itself in my life.
Close to 30yrs ago I had an accident on a job where I was placing a beam on top of a wall on a house we were building. This thing was huge, weighing close to 900lbs being 28ft long. I was standing on a saw-horse with it using everything I had trying to get it up on top of the wall when this idiot I was working with knocked the brace off the wall causing me to lose my balance. I was faced with a quick decision and had to jump off the saw-horse with the mean on my shoulder. As it hit the ground I don't remember much after that other than waking up with everyone standing around me asking if I was alright. I screamed at them all to not touch me and just let me lay there for a minute that I'd be alright. I managed to make it through the rest of the day out of sheer stubbornness if nothing else.
The next morning I awoke and proceeded to get out of the bed and fell flat on the floor with lightning bolts shooting down my legs and 10 million needles stabbing me in my feet. After arriving at the hospital the doc comes in and tells me he couldn't see anything wrong on the X-ray and thinks I may have just bruised or pulled some muscles. Two days later back in the hospital experiencing debilitating pain I get sent off for an MRI which shows I had blown out 3 disk one having and annular tear causing bone on bone and another bulging placing pressure on my spinal cord. At that point the ER doc refers me to a specialist and gives me some good pain pills and morphine lollipops. None of which helped with the pain.
A week later I make my way to the neurosurgeons office and wait and wait and finally he comes in and tells me what I already knew. I remember his exact words when he said "I've been a neurosurgeon for 17 yrs and frankly I don't know how you walked in to my office. " I remember what I told him too as I replied "we walk by faith, don't you know". He looked at me bewildered and proceeded to tell me i'd have to have surgery if I ever hoped to be able to walk again without pain. I told him "that's crazy" and got up and walked out of there telling him I'd let him know what I decided.
In the back of my mind I had this voice telling me that Jesus could cause the blind to see and the lame to walk and all I had to do was pray. So I went home crying in pain praying and pleading/bargaing with God to take it all away. What little I knew. My ordeal went on for a year then two. At times my legs would simply quit working or I'd start seeing spots from the agony and just pass out. It was a horrible horrible time in my life but I pressed on. At one point I remember getting kicked out of church and ask to leave because I made such a scene crying. I was told straight up I couldn't be interrupting the service like that. Angry at God doesn't begin to describe things, I think I was more pissed off at people's ignorance more than I was angry at God and it was indeed a hard place to be so I started praying for that church instead of pleading for my own plight.
It was shortly after that point when I realized I had so much more and offered sincere prayers for others that one day I woke up and had no pain. The numbness was gone. The pins and needles in the bottom of my feet had left me. The miracle received. I felt as if I had Bernadette new and my eyes toward life made slightly clearer.
A new dawn and another example. I'll keep this one short as I've alluded to it in previous post. Six months ago I went in for a ct scan because if some gut issues I've been having and they tell me I got stage 4 cancer. Ridiculous my little voice said to myself inside my deranged head. I remember thinking back on my back injury thing and saying to myself "oh no" ..."not this time"..."you're not gonna fool me twice" and made a commitment to my step-kid to "have faith" and deal with it by facing it head on and at least make all my doctor appointments. Seeing as how we were both living on the edge of homelessness at that time I continued to work as many hours as I could and put the cancer thing out of my head and stayed focused on making plans to get a place to stay so I could do chemo and not be on the streets. Just last November I had a colectomy taking out part of my colon and the doctor says he didn't see anything in there at all that looked like cancer. Two weeks after the surgery back at the cancer center my cancer doc tells me the pathology report was negative as well verifying what the GI doc told me. I remember Dr. Cancer asking me what I was going to do and I laughingly with tears in my eyes I ask him "are you crazy" ... "I'm going to wake up tomorrow and praise Jesus".
A long time ago when I was homeless living on the beach I learned a valuable lesson that led to me moving on with my life. That lesson was simple realizing that each day is a precious gift. A precious gift indeed. Be it in agonizing excruciating pain or faced with the threat of cancer. If you approach each day with an attitude of graciousness and hold fast to what little love there is left in this world then things aren't quite so bad and your faith will be increased. I had hoped the pain would leave and it did. I knew the cancer had no hold on me and the evidence was in the pathology report when it came back negative.
So have Faith. Have heartache and sorrow too. But know God is there with you if you hold on to that flicker of Faith.
Love is the key to it all (wink wink)