“The goofy thing about Christian faith is that your believe it and don’t believe it at the same time. It isn’t unlike having an imaginary friend. I believe in Jesus; I believe He is the Son of God, but every time I sit down to explain this to somebody I feel like a palm reader, like somebody who works at a circus or a kid who is always making things up or somebody at a Star Trek convention who hasn’t figured out the show isn’t real. Until.”Don Miller “Blue Like Jazz”

Have you felt like that at some point? Your talking about spirituality and possibly about your own experience and you just can’t explain it anymore. There are many times when I have talked to people and I know that they are wrestling with this thing called spirituality and trying to grasp God and they feel God working on them but they just grasp any of it. We’re looking for some rational reason for the way we feel about God, Jesus, etc because our truth is found in rational things. But with God sometimes, we can’t find it in the rational. Sometimes we just feel the moment in this case. We experience God. We experience spirituality. It’s like falling in love—it’s there but it can’t be proven. There are a lot of things that are true but just don’t make sense.

G.k. Chesterton says that chess players go crazy, not poets. I don’t think you can explain the workings of Christian faith. It’s a mystery and it will always be a mystery. And to be honest, I love that mystery. “It cannot be explained, and yet it is beautiful and true” (Miller, Blue Like Jazz).

In the quote from Miller at the beginning of this post he ends it with “Until…”. This until leads into a beautiful story about his friend Laura who begins to believe in God after struggling with this feeling of God calling her but feeling she can’t do it. This feeling of wanting to do it and not be able to do it. Through her feelings of not being able to explain it and series of talks with friends not being able to explain she needs Matthew and Mark and in the middle of mark comes to the conclusion that Jesus is the Son of God. What a beautiful story. This made me think of an experience of my own.

My senior year of college I sang with a group called Express and we arrived at Christian camp to sing. We were walking to the dinning hall when all of a sudden a girl comes running down to meet me. She is crying and saying that she wants to be baptized and she would like me to do it. It was a great honor for me. The year before I worked at the camp and she was saying that she really appreciated the love that she saw from everyone but she said she saw a great example in me and for a year she had been searching to find out who is God, who is Jesus and what is this faith she kept hearing about. And it all came together a year later and she felt that it was the right time. God was calling her and she was ready to answer the call. So that evening before our performance we went to the pool and she was baptized into Christ. As I brought her up from that water I thought “I have a new creation in my arms” and I just said “Thank You God”. How amazing that feeling was!! At that moment, I had no doubt in my faith. I know what I believed because I felt it and she felt what she believed as well.

Sometimes it’s the unexplainable, mysterious things that make this journey so wonderful…