This is the aspect of faith I want to write about...because I feel it is often the most necessary thing to understand and yet the very part of it that causes people to 'lose it.'
We live in a society that increasingly expects instant results. We regularly watch television shows where complex problems are solved within a half-hour time slot. We get on the computer and have instant answers to almost any question. We log on to a 'social network' and get immediate access to our loved ones. We are used to, and expect, results...NOW.
But faith doesn't work that way...at least not as often as most seem to think it should.
About 30 years ago I was a freshman in college...just off of my mission. I'd had a good mission and considered myself 'true and faithful'. I took a social psychology class from a professor who had been ex-communicated from the faith and was apparently quite proud of it. He had been in a bishopric at the time of his departure and knew the gospel rather well. He, like others, considered it his duty to clear up the 'superstitions and erroneous traditions' his students had been 'infected with' during their eighteen years in a Mormon home...and to warn those who hadn't been thus raised to 'be wary'. I had the gut feeling that here was the proverb "misery loves company" being fulfilled. But he knew his business and succeeded in creating doubts in my mind.
It was at this time that I realized I must make a choice. That was either to stay true to the faith and hope I would figure it out later, placing my faith in God to answer in His time through the medium of the Holy Ghost; or to listen to my doubts, quit church, and try to figure it out on my own. It would have been easy to do the latter, making a 'party' of life in the mean-time. I chose the former.
To be honest, I had kind of forgotten the whole matter. One day, years later, during a quiet time away from the noise of life, the memory of those events came to mind and the answers 'hit me upside the head' and said "here I am". It was an interesting moment. It was at that time that I realized what I had heard in a conference talk is true, that the answers will come as an integral part of consistently serving in the Church and through the experiences of life as we remain true and faithful. Apparently, the Lord saw that I would not have understood to any appreciable depth the answers way back then. I had to gain the experience and insight necessary to understand the answer He wanted to give me, and, this time, it took quite a while.
The point is, I had to have faith...or participate in the act of faith, to endure long enough to get the answer.
It seems that so many of us are willing to dump it all down the drain because we don't have our every question answered 'right now'. Especially the "Why is this happening to me?" questions. I've become convinced that life would have very little purpose if we didn't learn anything, and that lessons are best learned by experiencing them ourselves. Faith is, by definition, the act of hanging on when we see no immediate relief. Sometimes that means 'hanging on' until the relief that is already there can actually do us good because we reach a point of understanding.
We want to complain that God doesn't give us the answers when we want them, but we would complain all the more if He didn't develop in us the ownership necessary to realize their worth. We want Him to solve our problems, but we would rebel if He took away the right to make the necessary choices that would need to be made. People say there is no God because things don't go the way they think they should, but all He wants is to allow us the experience necessary to understand the process of making things happen that, right now, are beyond our imagination. That takes a lot of faith, but I believe He is our greatest friend and is doing all He can to make it pay off.
Who else would allow His most loved child to suffer and sacrifice in our behalf? The least we can do is have faith enough to endure.
