The cartoon above says, "Your order is not ready, nor will it ever be!" That is the man's experience at "The Disillusionment Cafe."
Disallusionment comes to many people in their faith journey. I have been reading a book by an Episcopal priest named Barbara Brown Taylor. She writes about her disallusionment as a young woman when challenges made her question the beliefs that she had about God.
Many of us were brought up believing that if we were good that God would take care of us and that everything would be fine. This belief carried us until something happened in our life that threw us into turmoil. Maybe someone close to us died or we experienced a health challenge. Why did this happen to us? we wanted to know. What about God's promise to take care of us? It is times like this when disallusionment may cause us to question our religious beliefs and we may even doubt that there is a God.
When I was 20, I met John, who was unlike all the other boys that I had dated. He was very religious and wanted to become a minister. I fell for him hard and began to picture myself as a minister's wife, standing next to him in the church, supporting him in his ministry. John played football for Wichita State University and, enroute to a game in Utah, the plane that the team was flying on crashed into a mountain in Colorado, killing John and most of the people on board. I was devastated and disallusioned. How could God let this happen to John? I wondered. I struggled with my beliefs about God and for awhile I stopped going to church.
I found that over the years I began to see God differently. I used to believe that God caused everything, which is very much in alignment with the Old Testament. The people angered God and he punished them. They repented and were rewarded by God. This idea does not always play out in real life. What I finally came up with was this....
God is the energy and the force behind all creation. We were created in the image of God, therefore we have the ability to create too. We also have the ability to make choices. We can choose what to believe and how we will react. Things happen in this world that we cannot always explain or understand. I do not believe that God causes things to happen such as tornados, bird flu, hurricanes, or plane crashes. God gives us the strength and the creativity to face and overcome the challenges we encounter. We may not be able to avoid these life changing events, but we can get through them and even become stronger because of them.
I look back on my faith at the time that I was dating John and it was a naive sort of faith, a blind faith. I now have a deeper faith which has been tested many times over the course of my fifty-plus years. I don't look to a God in the sky to save me but to a God within me to give me courage, guide me through the challenges and and to even help me see the blessings that these trials may provide me with along the way.
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