Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for. By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible. – Hebrews 11:1-3
Friday afternoon, merging into busy traffic on Capital Boulevard, I accelerated into my space then checked both my rear-view and side mirrors before changing lanes so I could be in position to turn left at the next light.
I came within a hair’s breadth of taking out the motorcycle that had just zipped into my blind spot. But for the rider’s heads-up awareness and sharp maneuvering skills I would have knocked him off his bike and into the median.
I am always amazed at the length and the width and the depth of a blind spot. Blind spots are like black holes with the capacity to suck in anything and everything up to and including a large truck.
So I talked to a couple of biker friends from church about strategies to increase my awareness and it turns out there are a number of proactive steps I can take to hone my skills and avoid making a potentially fatal error in judgement.
Other Monster Blind Spots:
But blind spots don’t simply crop up when driving, and the term immediately came into my mind at the men’s Bible study this morning when we were discussing C.S. Lewis’s writings about faith and trust. There is a massive blind spot, it turns out, where our ability to understand peters out and the deeper truths about God begin.
For faith to grow we must come to the place of surrender, where we understand there is absolutely nothing we can do to earn God’s favor.
For faith to grow we must come to the place of surrender, where we understand there is absolutely nothing we can do to earn God’s favor. But we typically only get to that point by wanting so much that we try – and fail – anyway. Then, understanding our need for grace and accepting Jesus, we continue to try hard but now in a different spirit. Now we follow Jesus in word and deed out of gratitude and in response to love.
We catch a glimpse of the light and we understand that its source is the Creator. Faith brings us to the point of accepting God, trust removes the safety harness and handrails of carving out a path of our own, and then our next steps in faith involve walking with Jesus, following his way to truth and life, keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus, eventually nearing the stage where – as Lewis puts it – “the road passes over the rim of our world…”
This faith and this trust are necessary if we are to move through the blind spots and begin our journey with Jesus. We cannot figure it out for ourselves, no matter how much we want to, and how much it offends our binary sensibilities not to understand. But we must not limit God and demand that faith shrink to fit our own intellectual and spiritual limitations.
Sometimes the equations do not balance out and we cannot solve for “x” and certainly not for “me” – but Paul understood this well when he wrote, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (1 Corinthians 13:12).
It’s a journey. A journey beyond. A journey home.
– DEREK