Does Faith Have a Destination?

I had arrived.

Or that’s what I thought anyway. After years of doubts, struggling to know what to believe, feeling empty and lost, and seeking fulfillment in relationships and partying, I finally knew what it meant to experience the Living God.

In my moment of hitting rock bottom, God met me, telling me it didn’t have to be this way if only I would let Him truly be Lord of my life. I pushed back, saying that I had indeed tried His way—I had been “the good girl” who followed all the rules and memorized all the verses and went to church 6 or 7 days a week—but it was impossible to sustain, and it sucked. He gently responded (how He was speaking to me, I do not know; I just know that He did), “That’s not my way. It’s time to try my way.” Realizing I had nothing to lose and no other options, I acquiesced and breathed a sigh of relief. 

Let me tell you, He was right. I had tried following the rules and being righteous, which is exactly the opposite of His way. It was a slow process, but I slowly learned what He meant by “His way” and what “abundant life” really was.

So why, 10 years later, was I struggling again? Hadn’t I already gotten over all my “doubts” and questions, hadn’t I figured out what I’d been doing wrong and fixed it?

If I was honest, I wasn’t wavering in my devotion to God. I had (and still have) no doubt He exists and is who He says He is. My struggle centered around what it meant to live out my faith and to be a Christ follower in our 21st-century world. It felt like the faith I had come back to that pivotal day 10 years earlier was no longer enough; it felt like it was too small to make sense of everything I now knew.

And that scared me.

It scared me not only because it felt like I was denying God, but also because I knew I wasn’t so it didn’t make sense. If I was absolutely certain God exists, He is who He says He is, and I owe everything to Him, then why did it seem like almost everything I’d been taught about faith and being a “Christian” was wrong or extremely limiting? If I loved Jesus with all my heart, then why didn’t I fit in with almost everyone at church? Why was I so convinced that applying Jesus’ teachings to my life looked very different than how so many other Christians in America applied them? What was I missing?

Over time, I came to realize that my problem was not with God or with faith in general. It was with the idea that faith can be fully achieved this side of eternity. 

In the U.S., we get so focused on the end-goal—the prize—that we diminish the journey. And by doing so, we make everything into something we can attain or buy or get. Want to be fit? This miracle pill will make you lose 50 pounds in 5 days! Rarely is it mentioned that fitness and health can only be earned through hard work and dedication, let alone that once you hit your goal, you can’t just stop all that hard work and expect to stay fit and healthy. It’s something that must be maintained in perpetuity, and therefore you can never really “achieve” fitness.

It’s the same with almost any other area of our lives. We think we’ll be “successful” if we can reach a certain salary or net worth or position. We think we’ll be happy if we can only get the girl or have a baby or get a certain number of followers. But as Don Draper so astutely reminds us, “What is happiness? It’s a moment before you need more happiness!”

As odd as it sounds, faith is the same. We will never fully arrive and be able to sit back and say, “I now know everything I need to know and understand God fully, so I’m done.” It sounds absurd when put in those terms, yet we all subconsciously treat faith that way, thinking that one day we’ll finally “arrive,” that one day we will reach the pinnacle and be above reproach. But because the object of our faith is beyond our full comprehension, we will never reach the top. As far as we’re concerned in this lifetime, there is no pinnacle; there is only more up. Yet if we continue to think of faith as achievable, we will stop moving up (or worse, regress back down), never gaining the new perspective that getting just a little higher would have brought. And we will never know what lay just ahead on the mountain of the beautiful mysteries and depths of God Himself.

So back to my despondent self who met God all those years ago. Thankfully, I now realize that I had in fact not arrived; I was only just beginning my journey. And I pray that my faith and my understanding of God today is more true, more robust, and more Christ-like than it was then. I pray that my faith 10 years from now will also be more true, more robust, and more Christ-like than it is now, and that I will continue to press into the heart of God more deeply until the day I get to see Him face to face.