fright faith.

My faith is about to get really stale.

Up to this point, it's been almost entirely about me. Which is fine, because it needed to be. I had (and have) a lot of misconceptions. I needed to root through the fine points, praying and thinking, and inviting God in refine.

But, I feel like I'm at a juncture. And it's maybe a dangerous one. Maybe one at which it's easy to get lost, to become stagnant.

Though there's still much work to do in thinking and praying and rooting, if my faith continues like it is, I'll miss the larger part of what it means to live in God. I'll not understand that I don't have a strictly personal faith. See, my faith, it isn't just for me.

I used to rail on about how the problem with American Christianity was that people didn't understand the supposed power of their supposed deity. That if they really "got it," they'd be an unstoppable force for good.

At the time, I had the passion, but lacked the Truth.

Now, I'm in danger of knowing the Truth, but not allowing that Truth to loose the passion.

These men came to James River earlier this year--men from other countries who, frankly, scared the crap out of me with their healing prayers and over-the-top stories of crazy foreign Spirit experiences. Their faiths scared me. They also enticed me.

The thing is this. If I believe in God, and I do, then miracles are not so crazy. And if I believe in miracles, there's no reason not to believe in asking for them. And if that's the case, then I could potentially be the kind of person who asks boldly for bold things, who acts boldly for bold things. But... I realized then, as I know now, that people of that kind of faith are normal. They don't have super-human wisdom, or inordinate amounts of courage. They just make the decision to believe at every juncture. And over the years of their lives those decisions all link together to form a chain of astounding strength. They move mountains not because they are themselves mountain-movers, but because they have learned to allow THE mountain-mover to dwell in them. By faith.

It'd be very easy to stop here. I have Christ, after all! It'd be so simple to stop growing here. To decide that I have enough God in my life now to live on. But what is the point of a half-lived faith? That seems almost detestable. To be so close to God, and so far from His power. If God is real, then I want ALL of what there is to have of Him. Even the parts that can only be gotten through doing scary things.

I doubt that I'll ever be casting out demons in Sri Lanka, but all the same...