A faith that produces action

I caught up with a friend I haven't seen in years. He went to a prestigious business school, and then into consulting, and then followed this with a corporate career. He made it to the position of CEO, the top of his profession.

But he was deeply unhappy. He saw a psychologist, who did an unusual thing. Rather than treat my friend for years and years, peeling back the psychic onion one thin, expensive layer at a time, he made a simple, but profound diagnosis. "Your problem," the psychologist told my friend, "is spiritual."

And so the psychologist referred him to a pastor.

My friend is transformed. He has reevaluated everything: his career, his parenting, his marriage, his sin. He is profoundly repentant for the dark things of his past, and is simultaneously on fire. His passion right now is prison ministry. Alongside other men, he now spends considerable time at a maximum security penitentiary, sitting with hardcore criminals, talking with them, listening to their stories, letting them know that despite the harm they've done to others, they are still loved, which is the message any of us need to hear, though sometimes we imagine that grace only extends to our crimes, not the crimes of the really, really bad people, the people far worse than us.

The danger for most of us is that announcing our faith might lead to some discomfort, some mild mockery, if even that, or perhaps simply a sideways glance. My friend works with gang members who publicly renounce their gang membership, professing in its place allegiance to Christ. Where these men live, this can result not in a jaundiced gaze, but a hand-fashioned knife in the gut. When they make a public commitment you know that it means something.

These criminals who risk their lives solely for the privilege of publicly declaring their faith have humbled my friend. He looks at his own new faith, and the safety in which he can pronounce it, and recognizes how little he has to risk compared to these men whom most of society would just as soon lock in a dark hole and forget.

And in turn my friend has humbled me. Not many years earlier, we talked about faith-he the skeptic, me the confident amateur theologian. And now he has real faith, the faith that produces real action, and I am still noodling about in the maze of the intellect.

I can't imagine someone more on fire for God than my friend, and yet he considers himself unworthy, compared to those lowest of the low. I used to think I had all the answers, and was well-advanced in my faith. Lately, thanks to people like my friend, I've been seeing that I am only scratching the surface. "Oh me of little faith," goes the refrain to one of my favorite Nickel Creek songs. "Oh me of little faith."