All I have needed thy hand hath provided- Great is thy faithfulness, Lord unto me.
(Thomas O. Chisholm)
Great is Thy faithfulness. I love to sing it, but what does it mean for God to be faithful? Most of the time, we talk about our faith in God rather than the other way around.
When I slow down enough to really consider the lyrics of this song, I find a swirl of beautiful images, soothing, but not always in keeping with my reading of scripture. “Thou changest not…as thou hast been thou forever wilt be.” Really? Tell that to Moses. Tell that to the gentile whose child Jesus healed. “Peace that endureth?” Not in my world.
And what about all those times when it doesn’t feel like God is being faithful to us, when we ask but don’t get the help we were hoping for, a response we might interpret as a betrayal if a human companion similarly withheld what we desperately want? Most commonly, we either lose faith ourselves or struggle to find a reassuring explanation: “God always answers our prayers; it just may not be the answer we want to hear.” Or, “God answers in God’s own time, and God is always right on time.”
I think God’s faithfulness is about trust; God’s trust in us that despite all evidence to the contrary, despite our continued addictions to war, money, sex and power, despite enslaving our fellow human beings, despite our brutality towards women, people who don’t fit into comfortable sexual identities and expressions, and pretty much anyone else who isn’t just like us, God trusts that we’ll somehow work it out. That doesn’t mean that God thinks we’ll eliminate evil once and for all, attaining perfection on earth, but that we will continue to engage in the struggle, pushing things a little more towards justice, even knowing that things may tilt again in the other direction a few years (or a few days) down the line. Mostly, I think God’s faithfulness has to do with a trust that we will see God’s self not in miracles, and not always right on time, but in each imperfect, broken, screwed up, beautiful soul we meet. And in so doing, we will be expressing our faithfulness to God. That’s some kind of faithfulness.
Dear God, may I be as faithful to you as you are to me; may I be worthy of your trust, and grant the benefit of the doubt to those I encounter, no matter how difficult I find them (and they find me). May I know that when I try to work it out with them, I’m working it out with you.