Falling – God of the Sparrow 🌱 By Kathy Manis Findley

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In a tiny book of the Bible that has only 24 verses, we find an exhortation for understanding faith and unfaith. The writer must have known us — and known our lives and our frailties and our actions — ahead of time. He must have known about our faith, and about our unfaith.

It’s troubling at times to experience the many ways unfaith moves in on us until our faith is pushed out for a time. It happens, those times of unfaith. And I have to confess that unfaith has certainly been a part of my journey at times. How does it come on me? What causes it to attack my faith? I can describe a number of ways.

Disappointment and disillusionment in the unjust actions of the leaders of our government — That’s a big one these days.

Anger that children and families are suffering at the Southern border as our country behaves as an unwelcoming place — This is a very serious one for me.

Watching God’s Church go through the motions of religion while failing to create spaces for spiritual contemplation and justice making — Always, this has been a struggle for the Church.

Experiencing personal failure to the point of feeling completely defeated — It happens when one puts herself out into the real world.

Falling down in a state of exhaustion, frustrated with the struggle, ready to give up — It’s such a common state of being for me.

It is true that the preceding situations should not have the power to create unfaith in me. Surely my faith, a faith of so many decades, is strong enough to sustain me. The little Book of Jude offers 24 verses of exhortation to me and to us all:

“But you, Beloved, build yourselves up on your most holy faith; pray in the Holy Spirit; keep yourselves in the love of God” (v. 20). In other words, keep unfaith at bay, stand firm in God’s love, keep yourself from falling.

I happen to know about falling, spiritually and literally. I can recall times in my life when I fell into a brief place of unfaith, times when my hope was small and my spirit was assailed. I know all too well that falling is a situation in which you lose control as you completely lose your footing. It happened to me last night, in fact. In one moment, I was getting ready for bed, and in the next, I was tripping over a power cord, ending up on my back end with an excruciatingly painful knee, and slightly less excruciating pain in several other places on my body.

As my knee swelled to more than twice its size, Fred rushed in and together we plotted how I would get up off the floor. It was not easy, and on top of that, now I have to deal with the repercussions of falling: a hurt knee, painful toes, pain in my shoulder, my arm, my back, my hand and my bottom. It would have been much easier to keep from falling in the first place.

And that’s what Jude, brother of James, told us in the most beautiful benediction in all of Scripture.

Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James,

To those who are called, who are beloved in God the Father and kept safe for Jesus Christ:

May mercy, peace, and love be yours in abundance.

Now to him who is able to keep you from falling, and to make you stand without blemish in the presence of his glory with rejoicing, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, power, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.

Here we have some glorious, sublime Gospel Good News that we can count on:

We are kept safe.

God is able to make us stand without blemish in the presence of God’s glory.

God is able to keep us from falling.

Thanks be to God.

Losing Hope And Interest Quote Motivational Quotes For Hope Pics 15+ Don't Lose Hope Quotes With — Dr. Michelle Bengtson

How do we live after we have lost hope? How do we live with brokenness? What do we say to a broken world? What do we do with our broken hearts? The truth is that each day can bring us heartbreak. Any season of life can bring us failure. At times, the struggle is so intense that we do lose hope.

Khalil Gibran has written that “out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.”

How true that is, that our suffering makes us stronger, that our scars make us resilient. Most of us move through life steeled against any suffering. We bravely put on our body armor to protect us against every assault. We refuse to allow our vulnerability to rise within us.

I have been strengthened by Brené Brown’s book, “Rising Strong.” She points us to wisdom that names hope is a function of struggle, and challenges us to not be afraid to lean into discomfort.

Why would we want to do that, you might ask? Who in their right mind really wants to invite adversity into their lives? Why would we want to be vulnerable? We need to be strong. We need to live into courage. We need to be impenetrable, tough and impervious to anything that might hurt us.

Here’s what Brené Brown says about that:

Hiding out, pretending and armoring up against vulnerability are killing us: killing our spirits, our hope, our potential, our creativity . . . Our love, our faith, our joy. We’re sick of being afraid and sick of hustling for our self-worth. We want to be brave, but deep inside of we know that being brave requires us to be vulnerable.

“No adversity, no hope,” she writes. “Fall. Get up. Try again.”

As people of faith, we can speak, through our own heartbreak, to a broken world. We can offer the message that if you feel that you have to give up, hope whispers, “try one more time.”

When we live in life’s fullness, with our whole hearts, we will always know heartbreak. We will push to try something new, and sometimes we will fail completely. We will experience disappointment. But without those heartbreak times, we will never know that we can get beyond them.

If we never fall, we will never know that we really can get up. If we never lose hope, we will never experience the joy of finding it again.

If we never lose hope, we will never know new hope, fresh and pointing us toward the skies.