Faith is a radically different way of seeing

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The point of view of the believer is essentially and radically different from that of the non-believer. This is no mere difference of opinion. We Christians see all of life from the vantage point afforded us by faith. To those who have chosen to see life and the world without faith, the believer might seem ridiculous.

During the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, an American news team caught up with some Christian Haitians, quake victims, who were singing praises to God in the street. The newscaster seemed alarmed and confused. “Why would they do such a thing?” was the question behind the head-shaking and the knitted brow.

St. Paul warns the Corinthians that the world’s wise words “would make the cross of Christ pointless. The message of the cross is folly to those who are on the way to ruin, but for those of us who are on the road to salvation it is the power of God.” (First Corinthians 1:17-18)

We would do well to remember how fiercely God pits himself against the thinking of the age. The one is ruin, the other is resurrection. The one is the cross of Christ as pointless; the other is the His cross as the power of God.

Our guide refers to the believer’s point of view “the soul illumined by faith.” In every moment, he has told us, is the King present in disguise. In faith we see him beneath the trappings of what is otherwise deemed ordinary:

_{“He who knows that a certain person in disguise is the king welcomes him in a very different manner from one who seeing the exterior aspect of an ordinary man treats him according to his appearance … yet, the heart nonetheless reveres the royal majesty beneath the mean trappings.’” (Page 20-21)}

God appears to us cloaked in the commonplace. He speaks to us in the quiet of suffering. He whispers his presence to us in our lonely, sickly, distressed, weary, dreary hours. When our imagination is numb and our life drifts into windless seas and a remote malaise sets into our heart, God is present in a way that only faith can recognize. In all of these, God honors us by humbling himself to be with us through these “mean trappings” in such a way that we can turn from anything at any moment and say, “It is the King.”

We are told in several places in Scripture to “rejoice” or to “count it all joy,” when we are afflicted by what are either called trials or persecutions. (Matthew 5:12, James 1, Romans 5, First Peter 3, for example.) Paul is clear enough in Romans 12:12 – “Be joyful in hope; persevere in hardship; keep praying regularly.” For “persevere in hardship,” the Amplified Bible has, “be steadfast and patient in suffering and tribulation.”

Every believer will be confronted with difficulties, and will have to decide whether and how to integrate these experiences into his life of faith, or how to somehow detach suffering from faith. While the former is difficult, the latter is impossible. Faith does not equal suffering, but faith is all encompassing and does not overlook or dismiss suffering. Faith integrates suffering, duty and consolation. If it does not, it is not fully formed in us, and we yet have need for God to expand in us the sense of his presence in every moment of our lives.

He will not leave us fragmented.

It is his work in our lives that enables us to say, “It is the King,” and to recognize him in his many disguises.