"Fought-for Faith"

"Fought-for Faith"
God gives us meaning, not answers. The suffering of life is the suffering of every marriage union, every love relationship, like the suffering of Job in his relationship with God. The Book of Job is a dialogue between institutional, respectable and impersonalized faith (Job's friends who come and give him reasonable intellectual answers) and the charismatic, gut-level, fought-for faith of Job. Job searches and struggles and receives his answer only in the tempest. And the answer always has the character of paradox: inconsistent, contradictory, but utterly true. So the answer will be the same for us. The answer will come, out of the tempest, an answer that cannot always be verbalized to your children and husband or wife. But it will be an answer that you know. It is a conviction that is deep and all-pervasive. No one can give it to you, no one can take it away: It is a gift from God. You cannot prove it to anybody, but you no longer need to. Believe me when I say it: The deepest levels of faith will still feel like confusion - but you are not longer confused by your confusion!
from The Great Themes of Scripture