Faith Does Not Wait

I haven’t been writing much over the past week or so due mainly to the demands of settling back into “real” life after my trip to Colombia, as well as dealing with a persistent bug that seems to have followed me home from South America.  Even though being sick is no fun, there are blessings here too, for I have had found myself with much more time for reading than normal!  One of the books that I have been reading over the past week or so, as I continue to reflect upon and process what I saw and learned in Colombia, is Walter Wink’s Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination.  Here’s a quote I am mulling over today as I think about the reality of five million internally displaced people in Colombia:

We do not know how much of God’s will can be realized in human affairs. We must act as if the world can be transformed, without guarantees that it can be or objective evidence that we are succeeding. The messianic kingdom… seems to be a sort of halfway house toward the heavenly Jerusalem. These two images serve to keep the future open to possibility, but in such a way that we cannot be sure whether our own efforts will be decisive. We can only know by trying…

Faith does not wait for God’s sovereignty to be established on earth; it behaves as if that sovereignty already holds full sway. Like the psalmists, the early Christians declared as fact what existed only in imagination. Like God in creation, faith calls into being what does not yet exist, and races ahead to form something new that never was before… [T]o say that God has defeated the Powers is manifestly ludicrous in our world, if it must be heard descriptively. God is clearly not yet victorious. But if our praise evokes a new reality just beginning to come into being, then it helps create that new reality in the only way that it can be created.