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I’ve trusted in the invisible bridge for way too long… just not enough to take that first last step.
Been there, done that, have the scars to prove it.
My wife and I just fell down there a couple of weeks ago. When someone you love is dying a terrible, painful death, and it takes months and weeks, then you want to believe in that invisible bridge…
There weren’t any belive-in-the-bridge-people to pick us up after the fall. guess they all were too busy up there to take a look?
oh that’s not good
I’m really counting on there being an invisible bridge to something…somewhere.
What’s the alternative if there’s not one?
whoomp indeed
Sometimes we can grow just as much through the fall as we can through the bridge. Faith isn’t just walking along the bridge, it’s a truer test of faith to keep it when you’re falling. And even more when you hit the ground.
I suppose the real faith comes when you stand back up again.
That’s where I’m struggling a bit. Feeling like if I get back up, I’m just gonna fall down again.
Gets old after a bit.
@Günter I’ve been thinking about the whole ‘why do bad things happen to good people’ a lot lately. And I think it all comes down to trust. Not trust that everything will turn out fine (which it won’t), but rather trust that God has a point. And why can we trust that? Because he knows all the pain in the world first hand. He even got nailed to a cross by the people he loves. I guess that caused some emotional as well as physical pain… He knows what pain is, and if he deems it necessary for me to suffer, than I’m not happy about it, but I can at least accept it (in theory anyway).
Of course I constantly pray for less of these “Neeeeeoooooooowwww – Whoomp” experiences
I agree with Laura, the faith is getting back up again. But more. This reminds me of the way that ‘cognitive dissonance’ was explained to me. People in a cult believed the world would end on a certain day and were very vocal about it. It didn’t end. They all had mini nervous breakdowns but within a short time they’d all readjusted their thinking to create a new doctrine explaining away the problem. And it all felt okay again.
When you take a step of faith, and break your nose, one arm, both legs and lose four teeth, it’s time to reconsider your doctrine. Unfortunately, some of need to try out the invisible bridge a few times just to be sure that we really gave it our best efforts
its one thing taking that step and another being pushed!
….think i’m missing something smewhere….
why did that person take that step?
Thank you Allatsea, I found that very helpful
I know that God knows exactly how pain and suffering feels. Sometimes I just wish there were more of his people at the bottom to pick up the ones that got hurt.
We received more comfort from non-believers than from those who said that there is an invisible bridge. i guess they are too high above everyday life to care much.
finally I found God was down there, saying ‘whoOmp’, alongside me.
and you don’t even have to be walking out in faith, to slip down a chaism this big
you just have to care about stuff
Wulf @ 7 – I see where you are coming from in that, especially that somethings that are hard, are from God, and help us grow.
That is a fair solution/thought process for trying to understand why bad things happen to good people…
however I really struggle to think that all hard things are God’s plan to help us grow.
As surely that brings into question whether it is always ‘God’s plan’ that happens. (I’m not saying God won’t use bad things for good), but how can you get your head around the idea that not all things that happen were God’s plan? But that humans caused a situation or an incident?
I can’t get my head around this! sorry!
Günter – Sadly I think that ‘God’s people’ are sometimes a lot more concerned with managing the cognitive dissonances that arise when the events of life don’t match up to their promulgated ‘God-story’ than with being with those who are at the sharp end of suffering
I hope though that you and your wife have found some companions of the way in your dark time.
Wulf@7, I think I am more in sympathy with where Jiab is coming from on this one, in that I’m not at all convinced that God has a deterministic plan, especially not one which includes actively willed suffering and distress.
Jiab, you are absolutely right. Millions starving, war, earthquakes, etc… What message could there be in dying in a flood wave. The holocaust (indirectly) leading to the founding of Israel is an often used example for God turning something bad into something good. But honestly, if that is so, then I can’t help but wonder about the reasonableness of means.
I guess this whole explanation thing is just my feeble attempt to prepare my less-than-mustard-seed sized faith for any eventualities.
Gilly (10): Because he believed in something that wasn’t there. Better to use your senses and reason to establish the reality of the world around you. Faith can be a mental construct to help us in certain life situations, but it doesn’t actually change the facts of what is (or isn’t) around us.
This reminds me of a line from “There There” by Radiohead:
“Just coz you feel it, doesn’t mean it’s there!”
it can take years to get back up… i guess i’ve burned my invisible bridges now.
http://www.d-train.net/article/347/9-years
Chris – Thank you
jf… “but it (faith) doesn’t actually change the facts of what is (or isn’t) around us.” i think i disagree. people, through faith, do astonishing things all the time… like building real bridges, changing communities through bringing hope and serving people. faith, or at least the biblical idea of faith, will lead to action (it’s almost a verb). these actions physically change the world around us in a very tangible way. lack of faith can also change things, as it may well lead to doing nothing.
maybe we are defining faith differently. but i think faith continues to shape our world for better and for worse, depending on where are faith is placed.
does that make sense?
welcome to those who are commenting for the first time.
Jon @20 – James Fowler talks about understanding faith as a verb rather than a noun i.e primarily as something you do rather than something you have, which I find a really helpful way of thinking about it, and which is, I guess, something of what you are saying here?
yes it is, pat. that’s what i’m sayin’.
chris. it’s amazing to read people’s real experiences. especially when they’re as honest as the one in your link. it really is one of the best things about the internet. thank you.
thank you! it’s flipping good here, good stuff that often doesn’t get addressed in church. love it.
Thanks for this Jon. People are right, it is something that Church is very bad at dealing with. Despite the fact that we are told by Christ that we are to expect wars and famines and earthquakes, it doesn’t make it any easier to deal with. We oft hear the cry “Where was God?”. The answer that we often give is that God is right there in the suffering, the one holding us up, the one who offers that hand, the one that puts that smile on the face of a stranger. God, like the devil, is often in the details.
God made the world Good, not Perfect (according to the thought of Iraneus, and Genesis). A good world helps us deal better with natural “disasters”. A Perfect world means that the bar is set much higher.
This then leads us to the question “Why?”. That internible question that the Christian faith struggles to answer. Faiths that believe in re-incarnation can say “It’s learning”, the Christian faith, lacking in that, looks at a bad life and wonders where God was, or perhaps seek to blame Satan. Perhaps the point is learning. Not just learning for the people involved, but those outside, those that see these terrible things and do nothing, or are not moved to change their life. Perhaps we should all be striving, hear and now, for the kingdom of God. To step outside our comfort Zone, and to deal with things head on. To be brave enough to say that we don’t know, but that we trust. To be willing to step out onto that bridge 70 times seven times, and also help those that Woomp back up the clif ALONG SIDE us, that when we take that step, we take it together, you, me, and Christ. Wether the bridge holds us this time, or wether we fall. We ALL fall together.
~BX
chris.
bx… there’s something that i like about your image of falling together. if i’m honest, i prefer the idea of ‘together’ than ‘falling’. but you provide another image of what good community could be.
I have had to do that when I quit my job. The fall was more of a base jump as my house sold three days after I was told it would be too late… everyone was floating down diarrhea drive for a while!!!
Hi Gunter, would liked to have been there to support you.
BX, you do make a good point.
hmmm, dunno about an invisible bridge…
but sometimes, when I’ve been through a difficult passage… I look back and see some ‘handrails’ that I hadn’t noticed before… keeping me safe.
still not sure about this invisible bridge
but I wonder if a key point of ‘church’ or whatever Christian community we hope for
is to be the hands that help those who took the risk to pick themselves up after a ‘whoomp’?
still struggling with this invisible bridge thing
you see,
it’s not God asking me to walk on an invisible bridge that’s the problem for me
it’s the times when (s)He asks me to walk a walk that’s all too visible to me and I don’t want to go!
I can really see the function of church in a new light from these ideas.
Pat @ 15 – I want to agree with you (and pretty much do!) on your views of God’s ‘plan’ – however find so often Christian attitudes soo different! It is so lightly suggested by so many christians that God’s plan is what we are all going through.
Any idea how I can match up this undetermenistic plan with passages containing things such as:
“Let those who suffer according to God’s will entrust their souls to a faithful Creator and continue to do good.” 1 Peter 4:19
Where’s this invisible bridge? I’d like to jump off it.
Last night this cartoon made me cry. I’m not sure what it triggered except it really felt like if there wasn’t an invisible bridge, there wasn’t any kind of bridge at all.
I often think of my spiritual journey like this scene from Indiana Jones (not sure if it’s the inspiration for the cartoon or not). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-c8_OFwZoY
Some how the thought of not having that bridge there really effected me.
Not only that but you have to do it at least 77 times!!!
Matthew 18:22
Jon (20) Yes, of course. People do all sorts of amazing things independent of whether or not they have faith. Good works are performed by those of all faiths and none in pretty much equal measure (J L Mackie actually makes the assumption that atheists would express the greater levels of “virtue”, if it could be studied). At any rate, faith may motivate someone to build, but all the faith in the world won’t bridge even the smallest stream unless the physical action follows.
I was actually talking more about the way some people (singly, or in groups) dream …or “faith”, if you’d like it to be a verb
… things into existence. Things which are simply not there (like your bridge). As your cartoon demonstrates, this serves only to set up a dramatic fall at a later date; something which some of the earlier comments in this thread would seem to verify. My point was about the balance of faith versus reason. If we believe God gave us 5 senses, is it not folly to ignore them. If we have reason, are we right to ignore it?
My question, I guess, (which relates to a number of situations I frequently see) is that, if a friend is living out something which you feel to be palpably false, even if they believe in it 100%, and even if it is their “framework” for living… is it better to support, comfort, humour or ‘go along with’ that idea for the sake of short-term good feeling? Or is it better to try to gently disabuse them of that notion and avert the later fall?
As a bystander, would we have let the guy in the cartoon step over the precipice, if he told us he believed the bridge was there?
is it possible to have no faith, jf? atheism doesn’t believe in god, but as far as i know it is okay with faith?
the bible treats faith and action as pretty synonymous. that was the definition i was using in my above point.
regarding your last question, it seems to me it all depends what the invisible bridge is. i left it open as a cartoon to see what people came up with. that stepping in to the unknown thing could be a very bad idea or a very good one, it depends. in a sense, my working life has been filled with invisible bridges… mostly they were there but invisible, sometimes they weren’t there at all and i came unstuck. but i’ve done so many incredible things in my working life over the years that i’d never have done had i played safe. i really have had a fruit bowl of experiences and even now my work life is very varied, even though i struggle to leave home these days.
i wonder what advice i would now give to myself as a young man? hmmmmmm. you’re last question has got me thinking interesting thoughts.
What is the “invisible bridge”? If this is supposed to be symbolic picture about faith, then this is a bogus illustration. Were any of those in the Bible who walked by faith in Hebrews 11 stepping of a cliff to die at the bottom? No connection here.
it isn’t necessarily supposed to be anything of the sort, tim. you could easily conclude from the picture that the bloke’s an idiot.
Jon, you’ve got me thinking at #39. I’ve got some work related stuff which I’m mulling at the moment. I’m naturally a very risk averse person, and I’m standing at the top of the cliff, seeing the big Whoomp at the bottom, and wondering if it’s worth taking a big risk with taking a project in a new direction; if the invisble bridge is there, it could be very, very cool. But it could whoomp and that would be bad. Hmm. I wish God used Neon. It would make life much easier
Jon (39) Of course I have faith in all kinds of things and in people, too.
There is a faith that deals with
the “unknown” yet operates within the realm of reality; indeed a faith in oneself (and in others) to make the unknown work out for good is laudable and the seedbed of much that is inspirational about our existence as humans.
But there is also “faith” that CREATES an unreality and operates within that.
It’s sad that the same word is used for both concepts, as I would assert that the latter is dangerous for mind, body and soul, nor can one overstate the importance of being able to discern between these two kinds of “faith”. If you cannot make that judgement, be sure that there are charlatans, wish-thinkers and supernaturalists out there who will be glad to blur the distinction even further, in order to affirm and exploit your lack of discernment. This is the point at which the cliff analogy becomes particularly salient.
You’re assuming God knows.
laura (36) – I thought of Indie too. sorry you’re feeling (or were feeling bad). x
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