Are your prayers unanswered? Are you in a time of waiting? When you’re waiting you’re vulnerable. Doubts can grow. Especially when you’re experiencing suffering.
You begin to ask:
As a Christian, you know God is still good. But what can you do when the goodness of God begins to feel like a distant memory instead of a present reality?
Sometimes it’s hard to pray. Sometimes it feels like you’re repeating words, not talking to a person. From this we may even wonder if our faith is weak.
When that happens, what are we forgetting? What is missing?
Jesus once said, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.”
Do you know that feeling? When the work energizes rather than depletes you? There are days like this. But there are other kinds of days too, when the words of the old carol feel so true:
And ye, beneath life’s crushing load,
Whose forms are bending low,
Who toil along the climbing way
With painful steps and slow…
It was just a trailer for a video game. But to me it was something more. The music came from one of my favorite pieces ever. The visuals and narration portrayed the striving of humanity to better itself.
The striking last lines of the video:
“There’s no end to our imagination and no limit to civilization.”
It’s a compelling vision for humanity. It’s also incomplete. The story of mankind needs a hero, and that hero can only be God himself.
“Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”
Was he right to say this? Thomas didn’t tell us his epistemology. We don’t even know his attitude as he said those words. I suspect he was trembling, not indignant.
Was Thomas being reasonable? It seems ambiguous.
