Little miracles are going on. But you have to pay attention.
And choose to notice.
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| Meme found on Facebook |
I say this even as “murder hornets” were added to the "you survived April; welcome to level May" of Jumani memes over the weekend. And hurricane season is predicted to
be bigger than usual.
I came across a very good description of faith and choice
recently. I finally finished Brandon Sanderson’s Hero of Ages. I mentioned this book in a post in March, while
I was in the middle of it, before I ended up waiting six more weeks to get it
back and finish it. (Pay attention when electronic media from the library shows
up on your devices, or you might run out of time—is the moral of that story.)
I want to highlight chapter 75, out of 82 chapters plus epilogue, in
this third and final part of the original Mistborn trilogy. There’s a
character named Sazed, who is a Terrisman, in this magical fantasy world. I’ll try
not to include spoilers—other than this small one: Sazed figures out his
religious questions.
One of the tropes, the rules, of fantasy literature is that
you can’t have the God of the universe show up and manipulate things. Sanderson
knows this well. But he manages to talk about religious concepts nevertheless,
which is important, since fantasy literature is a way for us to look at
humanity from a different perspective.
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| Sazed--fan art from Mistborn Wiki |
Sazed is a keeper from among the people of Terris. Keepers have
the assignment of preserving all knowledge, particularly from before the world
changed a thousand years earlier. They specialize in different areas of study,
and Sazed’s specialty is religion. He has dutifully gathered and retained information
on every single religion ever believed in his world, by every people—except his
own, which knowledge has been lost to them.
In a previous book, he lost someone he loved, Tindwyl. And
that loss caused a faith crisis for him. He realized that, while he had often shared
with others the religious beliefs that he thought might help and comfort them,
he didn’t actually believe those teachings himself. With his personal grief, he
wants to be assured that there is an afterlife, that he will be able to see her
again. That would help him have hope—and even a reason for hoping—to forestall
the apparently imminent destruction of the world.
One of the things he has done is run through every single
religion, to find one that doesn’t have fallacies or contradictions that
prevent him from believing. He has done this systematically, getting down to
the last few. And as he completes that research, he’s quite despairing. He
finds nothing. But he wants to know: Is there a real God, watching over them?
Is there life after death?
At this point of giving in to despair, a character name TenSoon
shows up, a non-human. TenSoon needs Sazed to go to his people, the Kandra, and convince them to
help the world. And—the Kandra are in a way immortal, and their First Generation were
alive before the changes to the world—they hold the knowledge about Sazed’s
religion. So Sazed makes the journey to that previously hidden place. He has
recently arrived there, and has studied and learned all they have to share with
him, as we get to chapter 75.[i]
Here’s what he finds:
The Terris religion, as one might have expected, focused
heavily on knowledge and scholarship. The “worldbringers”—their word for “keepers,”
were holy men and women who imparted knowledge but also wrote of their god,
Terr. It was the ancient Terris word for “to preserve.” A central focus of the
religion had been the histories of how Preservation, or Terr, and Ruin had interacted.
And these included various prophecies about the Hero of Ages, who was seen as a
successor to Preservation.
Aside from the prophecies, however, the worldbringers had
taught temperance, faith, and understanding to their people. They had taught
that it was better to build than to destroy, a principle at the core of their teachings.
Of course, there had been rituals, rites, initiations, and traditions. There
were also lesser religious leaders, required offerings, and codes of conduct.
It all seemed good, but hardly original. Even the focus on
scholarship was something shared by several dozen other religions Sazed had
studied. That, for some reason, depressed him. It was just another religion.
What had he expected? Some astounding doctrine that would prove to him once and
for all that there was a God?
He felt like a fool. Yet he also felt betrayed. This was what
he had ridden across the empire, feeling elated and anticipatory to discover?
This is what he’d expected to save them? These were just more words. Pleasant
ones, like most in his portfolio, but hardly compelling. Was he supposed to
believe just because it was the religion his people had followed?
There were no promises here that Tindwyl still lived. Why was
it that people had followed this or any of the religions?
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| Sazed character concept found here |
Instead of giving up at this point, though, he dives back
into the research on the many religions. He goes through letters, journals,
papers—everything. And this time, instead of looking at the doctrines, he looks
at the people who believed. He expects to find evidence that the believers were
fools, that they just hadn’t asked the deep questions about their beliefs. “Surely
they would have seen the flaws and inconsistencies, if they’d just taken the
time to be rational and discerning.” But that is not what he finds. “The people
did not seem like fools to him.” He begins to see something important:
In the abstract, those religions were stale. However, as he
read the words of the people—really read them—he began to see patterns.
Why did they believe? Because they saw miracles. Things one
man took as chance, a man of faith took as a sign: a loved one recovering from
a disease, a fortunate business deal, a chance meeting with a long-lost friend.
It wasn’t the grand doctrines or the sweeping ideals that seemed to make
believers out of men; it was the simple magic in the world around them.
It reminds him of Vin, another character’s, learning to
trust the crew they had all belonged to—even after her childhood had taught her
never to trust anyone. Trust was necessary in order to work together to
accomplish their mutual purpose. Vin had to act on trust, and then the evidence
of their trustworthiness became evident to her. For Sazed it was “Trusting that
somebody was watching, that somebody would make it all right in the end, even
though things looked terrible at the moment.” But how could he trust when he
didn’t know whether he could trust? How could he believe when he didn’t believe?
To believe, it seemed, one had to want to believe. It
was a conundrum, one Sazed had wrestled with. He wanted some one, some thing,
to force him to have faith. He wanted to have to believe because
of the proof shown to him. Yet the believers whose words now filled his mind
would have said he already had proof. Had he not, in his moment of despair,
received an answer? As he had been about to give up, TenSoon had spoken. Sazed
had begged for a sign and received it.
Was it chance? Was it providence? In the end, apparently, it
was up to him to decide.
This is interesting to me, as a believer. I’ve often been
puzzled at nonbelievers who claim there’s no proof. But to me, what they’re ignoring
is all the evidence of my personal experience. Because they don’t believe, they
don’t see. Because I believe, I see. And I see more and more.
Sazed goes about putting the information away into storage,
and is startled by some realizations.
He slowly returned the letters and journals to his metal
minds, leaving his specific memory of them empty, yet retaining the feelings
they had prompted in him. Which would he be? Believer or skeptic? At that
moment, neither seemed a patently foolish path.
“I do want to believe,” he thought. “That’s why I’ve
spent so much time searching. I can’t have it both ways. I simply have to
decide.”
Which would it be? He sat for a few moments, thinking,
feeling, and, most important, remembering.
“I sought help,” Sazed thought. “And something answered.”
Sazed smiled, and everything seemed a little bit brighter.
He realizes he has suddenly become a believer. After a lifetime
of searching.
He would believe. Not because something had been proven to
him beyond his ability to deny, but because he chose to.
There’s a line in one of our hymns, “God will force no man
to heaven.”[ii]
What Sazed had been looking for was to be forced—by the sheer weight of
incontrovertible evidence—to believe. But what happens when a person has that
much evidence and still refuses to act according to God’s known will? Even Satan
knows God is real.
What God wants from us is to choose to believe. And with
that, to choose God and all His Goodness. In order to make the choice, we need
to act on faith, before we have total knowledge.
So, how does that apply to us in our trying times?
If we’re believers, we’re seeing an accumulation of miracles,
instead of just an accumulation of hardships.
Here are a few I’ve seen.
· My husband timed his broken ankle to coincide
with the stay-at-home order, which actually made healing less inconvenient, and
somewhat eased his usual desire to be out and about.
· We had a lot of food storage on hand, without
any panic buying needed, because our Church has been teaching us my whole life to
have food storage for self-reliance.
· The fresh food I’ve needed (and practically
everything I can eat is fresh food) has mostly been available, with only some
temporary missing pieces.
· My husband already had a Zoom account for his
business, which has been a great way to have little reunions with our kids. We
like this so much, the plan is to keep it up every other Sunday indefinitely.
· Most of my life our Church has emphasized
home-centered, Church-supported gospel learning. But a year ago January our
Church started a program that made that more understandable and harder to
ignore. And we had a year to practice it. Then, this January, we cut our Sunday
meetings from three hours to two—so the learning that would have been covered
in weekly classes is expected to be done at home and just enhanced in the
twice-a-month Sunday School. So when we were asked in mid-March to do home
church during the pandemic, we were prepared and practiced at it already.
· Because of these crazy times, people are turning
to God. This has included a number of new convert baptisms locally (following
all the rules to make those happen). And the Facebook group that started with
the Worldwide Fast April 10, now called Worldwide Unified, is full of outpourings of little
miracles, as well as calls for special prayers for many many reasons, followed
by additional outpourings of love and support. Many people have talked about coming back
to faith after years away.
· I’ve had time for gardening—which I’d never
really done much before, because Mr. Spherical Model always did that. I love
seeing my little seeds grow.
· I’ve had time for more music here at home, even
though I miss playing with my usual group. We’re doing things online to stay
connected and to keep playing some of the same music, separately together. And a year ago I learned how to use the software to write tablature, so I'm arranging a number of hymns and other pieces for the mountain dulcimer.
·
My usual fear of getting sick—because a regular cold can
hit me pretty hard—is somewhat lessened, because everyone all around is being so
careful. And Mr. Spherical Model isn’t going out to get any illnesses to bring
home, so I’m actually feeling more safely healthy for the time being.
· Doctors are making progress at finding
treatments, with several promising drugs and procedures quickly making their way through
trials.
· Researchers have concluded that young children do not spread the virus to adults. That’s pretty remarkable, if accurate.
There are more, certainly. And plenty more I’m still praying
for.
Maybe none of these looks like evidence to a nonbeliever.
But at some point we will be able to look back, and I believe we will see the
hand of the Lord more clearly in what is happening in His world, and under His
control. At least those of us with eyes to see[iii]
will see His hand.
[i]
While all quotes are from the book Hero of Ages, I had an audiobook
version. So I transcribed this portion. That means I may not have reproduced the
punctuation and paragraph structure that Sanderson wrote in the book. But I
believe I have been faithful in reproducing the words.
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