I am a runner. Not a brilliant runner but since I started (3 years ago and 3 stone heavier) I have gradually improved. To the extent that I have now ran 6 marathons, about 20 half marathons and oodles of 10K and 5K. I joined a running club and have watched my times tumble throughout the year. This culminated in a personal best of 3:33:20 at this years Belfast Marathon.
It got to the point where I was racing every weekend, running on my lunch break, running in my sleep, running to the extent that I was spending less time with my wife and children and more time pounding the roads on my own. While becoming a better runner I was simultaneously becoming a pretty rubbish husband and father.
My relationship with God was also deteriorating. I was falling into my old trap of self-centred thinking and poor decision making. I was becoming the old me. The me I despise. The me I want to bury forever but who keeps creeping back into my body, mind and soul.
My Bible study faltered and gradually ground to a halt. The journal I had been trying to maintain gathered dust in my ‘man bag’. Prayer time, always a struggle, became non existent or only when I was in serious trouble and then only in the form of panicky afterthoughts. I fell away from my church, from my God. The old ways were reclaiming me, the Enemy was gaining foothold after foothold in my meandering mind.
So…….what was I to do? My faith was leaking, haemorrhaging, fracturing under the strain of ego and sinful patterns of behaviour. I felt in a rut, a hole, a revolving door of guilt and shame. Unwilling to hand over my past, unable to deal with the present and the responsibilities I shouldered as a husband and father.
Well I didn’t really do anything. But God did. As is often his way he brought things to a head, to a shuddering halt in fact, in order to drag me sulking and pouting towards the path he has had mapped out for me since I was in the womb.
This opening blog is just a taster of my story. I hope to open up more in the posts to come. And maybe somebody, somewhere in the online ether will be encouraged and comforted by what I have to share. My last blog page was about me. This one is about God and my faith in him.
A floundering faith, a fickle faith, a fractured faith. But a faith all the same….
Where is your faith at today?
A Fractured Faith 