Seek God for the City - Day 13; Seeing is not always believing

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We are continuing to Seek God for the City, following this great plan laid out by Waymakers.  Our new weekly focus is: spiritual awakening of lost and broken people.  Under that umbrella, we are seeking God this week on behalf of the Asia and the Pacific. Today, we are seeking God on behalf of depressed people, and asking Him to draw the lost with His persistent love.

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Since the beginning of 2012, there have been a number of teen suicides in and around the community in which I live.  When we began this forty days of prayer, that was heavy on many of our minds and we were arming ourselves to pray against that darkness.

I write this having just heard late yesterday that there may have been yet another, in a town just south of here.

My eyes tell me prayer is not working.  Just look around.

My eyes (and ears) are sometimes easy targets for the enemy.  We see all the bad that continues regardless of our best prayer efforts.  And after all, seeing is believing, right?

Not so fast.  We have something better than sight.  1 Corinthians 5:2 tells us we walk by faith and not by sight.  Some people use the term "blind faith" and I have grown to dislike that term.  "Blind faith" sounds like we can't make out what is around us, what is ahead, and that we are just jumping off a cliff with a desperate notion (thanks Indiana Jones) that something will be there when we land.

"Seeing is believing."  

Hogwash.

Our eyes are limited and deceptive.  Thanks to microscopes and telescopes and prisms I know all kinds of things exist that the naked eye fails to perceive and went unknown for the majority of history.

Our eyes try to tell us that a man's heart is different because he looks different.  But faith tells us that there is a truth in the heart that God sees and will share with us.

Our eyes try to tell us that prayers don't achieve anything.  But faith says that God hears and responds!

Imagine an island where everyone is born and remains blind.  They would move about in their lives not knowing anything about vision.  Then imagine a physician shows up on the island, and knows some simple procedure to bring sight.  Only one man will try it at first.  Can you imagine his response?  

In this world, those with faith are like that man.  We have something that allows us to move about "seeing" better than the rest of the world who remain spiritually blind!  That is faith!  And when we have difficulty "seeing" with our faith, we need to remember to grab tightly to the hand of God and walk with Him.  Faith is that too -- holding the hand of, and walking with the One who can truly see!