"Help My Unbelief"
Written by Emma McCoy
2 minute read
Even though I’m well on my way to becoming an academic, I love to make fun of them. Most days I read scholarship about niche topics, have conversations with professors whose careers are built on complex theories, and try to untangle difficult essays with my classmates. Academia loves using niche, precise language to talk about the hypothetical, the what-has-been, what-is, and what-might-be. In the past year, I’ve learned about neoliberalism, post-recession as a genre, social justice within writing centers, and weather as a literary symbol for chaos.
Don’t get me wrong, I love academia. If money were no object, I would collect degrees like pokemon cards. Where I make fun of academia is in how esoteric the whole thing can be. For the most part, I’ve been fairly dissatisfied with the answers to the question, now what? As a literature major, I know that stories have real-world impact. I know writing directly influences the world around me. But often in academia, people get caught up in the minutiae of their discipline and lose sight of actually doing something.
This isn’t to say that only concrete things matter. But I am saying that there comes a time when theory stops, the discussion ends, and it’s time to leave the room and go do something. Apply the scholarship, test the theory, and put your money where your mouth is.
In a similar way, there comes a time when wanting to be like Jesus, wanting to participate in what the Holy Spirit is doing, and wanting to be open to discipleship looks like actually doing something. I’m not saying that prayer isn’t important; check back with earlier blogs for a look at how prayer is crucial, transformative, and a little bit dangerous. Rather, I’m arguing that only prayer, or only discussion, or only hoping won’t lead to the kind of radical transformation that Jesus has waiting for us.
The story of the boy with the unclean spirit is incredibly powerful when it comes to this idea. The father is the one who gets it right in the story; he begs of Jesus, “help my unbelief!” We’ve visited stories of uncommon friends for weeks, spending time with the woman at the well, the paralyzed man, the woman caught up in prostitution, and the boy with the unclean spirit. All of these people were unexpected, and Jesus used them to draw others into his transformational love.
So what does it mean to not only pray, “help my unbelief!” but also be ready to go into the week with an open posture, ready for how God might fill that space?
This Sunday at Spring Church, we’re going to pray together (using the prayer card in the image below), asking God how he might be calling us to do things differently in our ordinary week. If there is value, love, and transformation in hanging out with people we usually don’t, then how does God want us to go about that? Join us on Sunday where we’re going to walk through a prayer card, ask specific questions of God, and prepare for a transformational week where we apply what we’ve been exploring over the past few months.
Jesus transforms, unexpectedly. He acts radically, bringing into practice the Gospel of redemption, grace, and love. While discussion and exploration, like the specifics of academia, have their time and place (and certainly shouldn’t be discarded), eventually it becomes time to get up and actually do something. You can’t hang out with uncommon friends if you never leave your circle, your house, your usual commute, or your comfort zone. But what waits for you, when you do, is nothing short of transformational.
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