Another Gideon

I may have met Gideon yesterday.

Gideon, you may remember, was the fellow who was cowering away from his enemies, and, when approached by an angel, replied, "If God is with us, why has all this bad stuff happened to us?" He was so busy hiding from his fears that it was difficult for the Lord to prod him to the action that was required to set his people free.

This Gideon has had a rough time of it, all the while walking with the Lord. Her husband is heavily prone to addictive behaviors, he has zero money- or time-management skills (add that to years of self-employment, and the mind boggles) and a wife must submit to her husband, after all. She has survived a scary bout with cancer, spent years helping to care for her ailing in-laws, and lived most of her married life in a large, run-down house that has not one finished project to be found in it. She is not having fun.

The scary part may be that when I made a comment about the parable of the talents, and how everything used to be makeshift, but as I used what I had, the Lord made it grow, she replied, "I’m glad you think so." That scares me because it means she has fallen into the trap of believing her experience, rather than believing God. She doesn’t any longer even believe—not in her heart of hearts—that what God said is true, because something in her experience has gone awry.

I am not being judgmental; I have been there. Oh, have I been there. I have lived in that. Having lived there, however, I also know that it’s a lie. My history—or your history, or anyone else’s history—doesn’t necessarily declare the truth. The truth is what comes out of God’s mouth. We need every one of God’s words, in order to survive, because every word that God speaks is truth.

When we stop believing God’s words, that isn’t scary because it condemns us to hell or something stupid like that; it’s scary because it condemns us to failure, here on earth—and that is catastrophic. When we don’t believe, we do not obey; when we don’t obey, we fail. When we fail, we lose even what faith we had, because we are deceived into thinking, "God said, and it didn’t happen," having forgotten that what God said required something of us. And so the downward spiral continues.

I’d love to say that I have the answer to this problem, but I don’t; only God does. Everyone in Israel could have attempted to convince Gideon, and it wouldn’t have helped. He needed an encounter with God. This modern Gideon believes in God, and she loves Him, too (although I think she’s pretty disillusioned with Him) but it clearly been a long, long time since she’s had the sort of encounter that changes one’s life.

And when your life is that bad, it’s gotta change.

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