What the (bleep) would it take?

I’ve been keeping a list of things I’ve prayed for that have happened.  Five days after a five day bug, I still wasn’t feeling much better than functional, and friends were basically saying, “Boy, do you look awful!”  (They put it more kindly.)  I made it to church and asked for a blessing.  (I really hadn’t thought of asking God myself.)  By the time I got home, I felt much better.

Years ago, I would get headaches that lasted three or four days.  Then, I can’t remember when, they stopped.  I thought maybe it was because I stopped using a pillow.  But I had started getting them again.  But now, when I feel a headache coming, I ask God to stop it.  I asked boldly, not “if it isn’t too much trouble, if you don’t mind.”  (We had a sermon about that.)  And the headache stops.  (I don’t know if I should use an exclamation point here.  Should I really be surprised?  But isn’t it something to exclaim with joy and wonder?)

Friends I have been praying for are finding solutions to their problems that seemed practically insurmountable.

My faith has grown stronger.

There are others, but you get the idea.

But in the back of my mind, there is this gnawing.  Did things just work out that way?  After all, I had officially recovered.  My friends are intelligent people who can work out their problems. 
Then I think, “What does it take?”  Jesus raised people from the dead and still there were some who did not believe. 

I don’t know what it would take.  There are always going to be doubts. 

I saw an atheist video on Youtube about dumb things Christians say to atheists.  (The speaker, Hemant Mehta, http://www.friendlyatheist.com, put it more politely and was really very charming.)  And one of them was “You just have to have faith.”  It seems that this is what a Christian says when an atheist is about to win the argument.  But we don’t say it just to atheists.  We say it to ourselves every day.

And it isn’t a mark of defeat.  We know a lot of things are unexplainable or can seemingly be explained away.  But we have chosen to have faith, even though we can’t always do it as well as we should.

God understands and forgives.  And He will help if we ask Him.