It was Saturday morning a few weeks ago when I passed by the walk out area of our basement and noticed something didn’t look right. The glass on the doors was pretty gross looking and the stairs leading out into the yard were covered in bird poop.
We had a pretty rough winter where we live, and the home is new to us, so in my inexperience, I remember thinking that runoff from all of the snow and ice melting was the likely cause of the problem with the glass on the doors and resolved to make a point of washing them once the weather warmed up. As for the bird poop, well, the most likely explanation for that seemed to be that the birds were nesting some place in the area behind the house, and a cure would be as simple as finding the nest and removing it.
The problem was, there was no nest to be found. I looked under the eaves of the roof, in the corners of the home, and did a search in the trees in the area and didn’t find a thing. Frustrated, I concluded that there was something else going on that I couldn’t see and didn’t have time to deal with, and just let it go while I tried to come up with another hypothesis as to what might be going on.
About this same time, a day came up where I needed to work out of my home for a day. During the morning hours, I was hearing a knocking sound outside the house every so often. Several times, I got up to check and see if someone was at the door or if there was an animal poking around, and didn’t find anything, which I felt was odd. Needing to get some work done, though, I quickly forgot about it…
However, sometime in the afternoon on my day at home, I needed to go into the basement to grab something, and it all started to make sense. As I passed by the walkout area again, a bird slammed full speed into the glass door. When the bird hit the door, it slobbered up the glass and was so stunned from the hit that it pooped! As the bird was trying to recover, there was a knocking sound as it tried to right itself on the wood floor and rubbed against the doors it had just flown into. I finally had answers to what was going on!
As I went upstairs, I began to think about how wrong my assumptions were and how interesting it was that all three seemingly unrelated events were all very closely correlated with one another. However, I had a sense that was not the lesson God had for me out of this bizarre story – it is something that I believe is far more profound.
Lately, I have been struggling with a lot of things – work things, home things, etc. It has been a nearly constant battle for me for quite a long time – it feels like every time I turn around, something is going wrong that needs my immediate attention. After months and months of this, it starts to grind you down. It starts to make you wonder if the things you believe about God are really true. It starts to make you feel like all you’re doing is banging your head against a glass door.
It is only now that I can see that my problems are very much like that bird’s. Like the bird, I could see clearly enough where I felt I needed to go, and I had a belief about what the best way to get there was. But, there was something I couldn’t see that was in the way blocking the path. Moreover, what was in my way was causing me a lot of pain personally and spiritually.
I felt like God was using that bird to show me something about the power of “belief” – that is can be very harmful, particularly if one can’t see the whole picture clearly. We can even end up believing the wrong things while being rightly intentioned. Belief can make you keep slamming into a glass door because you’re “sure” of what you see.
God knows the damage belief can cause and calls us to a higher ideal – faith.
The problem for many Christians is that we equate “faith” with “belief” – that all we need to do is believe in the right things and that doing so makes all the difference in the world. But, that can be dangerous – we live in a world at war with forces on it that actively work to ensure that we don’t see the whole picture clearly. Honestly, knowing what I know about the world and the experiences I have make me question as to whether I can actually really “believe” anything with much certainty!
Faith, however, is so much more than belief. It is a condition of your heart, a willingness to embrace the vision of something that doesn’t exist and then working to ensure that vision comes to pass. It doesn’t require you to believe – it requires you to buy in, to trust, to pursue something day by day, regardless of the bumps that happen along the road to getting there.
God’s vision for the world is “on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10b), and he calls each one of us to buy into that vision by faith through relationship, through coming to know Him. My problem was that I was putting belief in front of faith, which led to screwed up expectations and ultimately disappointment and pain. What I needed to embrace was God’s vision and let go of my own.
By doing so I am filled with much more hope than I had before. I am confident that every prayer I offer in faith moves things in the direction of bringing heaven to earth – even if I can’t see it. It’s no longer about the bumps in the road or whether we truly ever “arrive” – it’s about the direction I’m heading in my relationship with God. And, that direction will never be directly into a glass door I can’t see!