Session 3

The final session arrived. This weekend has blown by so quickly, I can hardly believe it!

Dave talked about the last thing that we can do when God is silent. If you have done all of the other steps, sometimes it still isn't enough. What else is there to cling to? What can propel us forward?

The answer is simple: faith. This isn't a cut and dry solution. It isn't a nice and easy answer. It is often times ugly. It is hard. It takes patience and perseverance. Tears and heartaches. Faith isn't grounded in what you can see or touch, but in that which is unseen and unfelt.

Faith isn't something that you can inherit from your parents, from your friends or from your church. It is something that you must wrestle with and make your own. A. W. Tozer notes that the most important thing about a man is what he believes about God. Do you believe that God is there when you cry out of desperation into the silence? Do you believe that God still cares when it feels like no one else does? Do you believe that God's grace is enough when you feel as if it isn't?

What do you do with the dark and ugly times of your life? What do you do with those moments and seasons where your heart feels like it splinters over and over again, and no one is there to help you put the pieces of your life back together? Where is God when you sit quietly at night with no one to hold you and help you through those dark hours of your life? Is He even there? Is He even listening? Does He even care?

Does your faith allow you to ask Him those things? Can you cry out in frustration to God? Does your faith allow you to be real with Him? To be vulnerable? To be yourself? Is your faith strong enough to propel you through a time when your parents get a divorce, or when your spouse cheats on you, or when you lose a loved one?

Faith isn't a romantic concept. It is the gritty bedrock of our relationship with Christ. It is what we can fall back onto when our whole world falls apart all around us and there is nothing left for us but a free fall, or a desperate clinging to our faith. Does your faith offer you thought?

When there is only silence to greet you, you must fall back on your faith and be able to fall back on it time and time again. Faith is not believing in what you have seen. Rather it is believing in what you haven't seen. Or for the sake of this trip: Faith isn't believing in God speaking, it is believing in God when you don't hear Him speaking.