"I am beginning to understand that faith is not the way around pain, it is the way through pain. Faith doesn’t get rid of the opposition, it invites it over for dinner. Faith doesn’t give you the winning point at the last second, it ties the game and sends you into overtime. Faith doesn’t give you the solution, it forces you to find it. Faith doesn’t teach you at the moment, it teaches in retrospect. Faith doesn’t provide a net to fall into when your fingers are about to give way as you hang suspended over the cliff, faith gives your fingers the strength to hang on just a little longer.
In other words, faith doesn’t do anything when it’s doing something. Faith doesn’t change anything when it’s changing things. Faith doesn’t make a difference when it’s making a difference. Faith makes itself known in life’s difficulties by making the difficult more difficult. Faith doesn’t comfort, it discomforts by forcing us to recognize its unwelcome presence. It is a nuisance, really, an interruption when we don’t want to be interrupted. It gets in our faces and reminds us that it is not irrelevant, even though it seems irrelevant. Faith is the annoying recognition that demands us to take our relationship with Christ seriously, when taking it seriously doesn’t seem to matter. It is God shouting to us in our circumstance, "Faith in Me does matter; you figure out how!" It is the persistent, nagging presence that feels like an absence."
-An excerpt from "Annoying Faith" by Mike Yakonelli.
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