The Smelting of Faith's Steel

In school, I had a friend named Sarah. She wasn't the bubbly sort, but she was unflappable. Shortly before a major paper was due, Sarah's grandmother was near death, and she dutifully went out of town. Although completing the paper required all night upon her return, she completed it. Knowing my own anxiety, I gushed that I could not have stayed calm under such circumstances to complete it. You didn't see me, she said. I wasn't calm.

David allows us to see faith's battle with anxiety as a work in progress. We take steel's strength for granted as we ride in vehicles or ascend in skyscrapers. Here, the smelting of faith's steel in Psalm 56:8-10 (NIV) is transformative enough to slow down for stop-action examination.

8 Record my misery; list my tears on your scroll – are they not in your record?

This is an honest, detailed complaint. Trailing the particular human causes of his misery  is prayer as a kind of protest. "God, are You getting this down? I'm not satisfied with an Executive summary! Did You record every stinging detail of his slander?" If words or actions are going to hurt David at point in time, he is going to insist on turning them over to God specifically. Particular pain plus general theological bromides equals the continuing disillusioned misery that we should know better than to hurt. This formula requires us to be more brave than David, the warrior king.

9 Then my enemies will turn back when I call for help. By this I will know that God is for me.
Seconds before, David had the boldness to insist that God care about his hurts enough to document them here admits to some ambiguity in his faith. Between 8 and 9, the combination is compellingly human. If David's interior dialogue wasn't something like this, ours certainly is. "God, I've developed the discipline of crying out to You and knowing that You hear every word, but I need confirmation like anybody else. Bolster my faith, Lord, by taking action in terms that mean the most to me right now." THAT, when God takes care of our presenting "by this" is when David's Gospel, or Matthew's, or Luke's, becomes ours.

10 In God I trust and am not afraid. What can man do to me?

We skip to verse 10 as a kind of mindless motto without considering the previous two verses. Do I, or does he, or does she, have bulletproof, swaggering, vocal faith? Discipleship, then, has all the intimacy and authenticity of a flowchart. If yes, if we are boasting like David before Goliath that man can't hurt us, then we are People of God. If no, if we don't automatically and always brag on God where men can hear, then our supposed faith must be a fraud. If we need a process so mechanical, the biblical diagram must allow for, insist on, a loop back to verse eight in a repetitive, renewing, candidly noisy cycle .

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