When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, reason like a child, think like a child. But now that I have become a man, I’ve put an end to childish things. — 1 Corinthians 13:11
The Christian faith is not a smooth trajectory upward. Rather, it’s an upward trajectory characterized by drops and valleys.
It wasn’t until seminary, when I interned as a chaplain in the ICU of a kids hospital, that I realized this. When I saw a twelve-year-old boy die of cystic fibrosis, gasping for breath, my childlike faith died with him. No way could I rationalize the sweet love of Jesus allowing a little boy to be snuffed out as cruelly as this.
Talk about dropping into a faith valley.
But now, decades later, it strikes me that such awful encounters thrust us into a more mature faith. It makes us set aside our desire to control God, that if we do good things we’ll avoid bad ones. Rather, it moves us to the cross, where even Jesus felt that God was abandoning him.
When we think our faith is a get-out-of-suffering card to be played at hurtful times in the game of life, we’re mistaken. We’re reasoning “like a child,” as Paul would say. And, when we try to make the Bible say what we want it to say (as we see with some fundamentalist preachers doing), we’re simply refusing to grow up.
The valleys of our faith strengthen our hearts so we can grow out of them. Each valley pushes us to keep putting away childish things. And each time we do that, our faith deepens a little bit more. We grow more comfortable trusting that God is leading in ways we can’t and shouldn’t try to understand. That’s why the cross continues to be the symbol of that faith. We don’t shy away from the valleys because we trust God will–somewhere, somehow–lead us toward an opened tomb.