Be Careful What You Preach

(I wrote this Saturday night, before Brahima's death.  Obviously, this needs a follow-up.  I don't have that in me right now, but I'm posting this because I do believe it to be true.)

Be careful what you preach.  It might turn out to be true; then you’ll have to believe it. 

No, no, it’s much better to stick to pleasant niceties that can hardly be proved true or false and which require no belief.  The moment you start making truth claims, you will force everyone, including yourself, to believe or disbelieve.  The majority—again, including yourself—will disbelieve, if not in word, then at least in deed; if not in mind, at least in heart.  Yes, this same majority will walk away nodding their heads, giving mental assent to your claims, but they will not believe.  Belief is much too difficult. And if the word “belief” means only a list of things to which you ascribe and speaks nothing of risk, complication, and sinking-in-the-pit-of-your-stomach, then it is quite possible that you’ve never believed. 

I, for one, am regularly amazed at the number of things that I have never truly believed.

This summer, I preached a number of sermons in a variety of settings.  Some of them were full of mere niceties, but I did manage to sneak in a couple pearls of truth.  I spoke of living out a radical, sacrificial love, of yielding to the Holy Spirit so that His fruit is produced in our lives regardless of our circumstances, and of putting it all on the line for the advancement of the Kingdom of God here on earth.  Now has come the challenge of belief. 

I did perhaps talk about at least one thing that I’m not sure that I have yet believed.  I spoke about the tendency we have to break our world into neatly categorized boxes that interact only minimally.  That is, we have our physical/material box, which has very little interaction with our spiritual box.  A problem in the physical box has a very set and determined physical cause that has only a physical solution.  By such tidy division, we can more easily understand—and thus control—our world.  Not that I have rejected my Western education completely.  However, living in Africa, where the prevailing worldview makes no such rigid distinctions, I’m persuaded to think we have separated our spheres too much, to a place where we have left the real Christian worldview.

What, after all, is prayer, if not a spiritual imploring for physical results?  What is compassion, if not physical acts with the hope of blessing and loving another’s spirit and soul?  What do we make of miracles? How do we explain the meaning of the crucifixion and the resurrection if never our tidy boxes meet?  A world of mixed boxes is quite messy, requiring a seemingly incompatible combination of science, knowledge, wisdom, and belief.  This perhaps explains why we pray so rarely, limit our compassion severely, and understand so little the mystery of the Gospel.  And we reject miracle out of preference for rigid lines.

Being by nature and education something of a cynic, I find belief difficult in the first place.  So when belief becomes complicated, I’m in way over my head.  Right about now I’m drowning.

At the start of this week, I received news that one of my friends was seriously ill.  Brahima was in the government clinic in town, and when I went to see him, I saw that he was in bad shape.  Worse, the treatments being prescribed were completely inadequate.  The next day, the family opted to take Brahima home and allow us to treat him from home.  (Sounds crazy, I know, but it was the best we could do.  He would surely have died had we left him there.)  He made steady progress the first couple days.  The morning of the third day everyone was overjoyed to see him out and about, acting quite normal, but at noon, he started seizing.  The aftermath has us still picking up the pieces.  He is now having trouble talking, speaking, and seems to have some weakness on his left side.  Though he is making small improvements, the road ahead is long and fraught with perils.  It has been a roller coaster of emotion.

(Israel, Brahima, and I)

The spiritual storyline is equally bumpy.  In the course of our friendship, I have had the chance to share the Gospel with Brahima.  He says he believes deeply, he has started reading his Bible, and yet he has made no public declaration for fear of what his family will do to him.  He was out in his village celebrating the Muslim month of Ramadan with his family when I got back to Mali, so I have not had a chance to talk with him further.  His family members, for their part, have come to town and desire to perform traditional prayers and magic on Brahima, believing the illness to be caused by a curse.  They have been very respectful and thankful of my involvement.  I have shared with them the Gospel, including my firm belief that God gives us wisdom to treat medically, but also that Jesus has broken the power of every curse.

When I first saw Brahima in the hospital, I left with a prayer that God would preserve his life and somehow use this situation for His glory.  I was immediately convinced that there were major spiritual implications to this illness.  When he took a turn for the worse, I sat next to his bed knowing that my friend was perilously close to death and praying for a miracle.  I claimed him for the Lord.  I pleaded with the Lord to leave him among us.  I rebuked the enemy.  I claimed the power of Christ’s resurrection and told death it couldn’t have him.  I lowered his fever; I pushed meds into his IV line.  I went home and sent emails asking people to pray.

I continue to pray for complete healing for Brahima.  I pray that somehow his family would see and know God’s power and love.  I continue to give him the best medications we have.  I have started rehab work with him.  I’m utterly convinced that this storyline is still playing out and we have yet to begin to see the ripple effects.  I’m staggering and stumbling through this mixed box world.  I’m putting everything I’ve got on the line.  I’m trembling under the weight of my belief.

Lord I believe; help my unbelief.