Most of the time we experience a crisis or other kind of life struggle when our expectations are not realized.  That cuts both ways.  When someone that we expect to be brutal and hateful turns out to be warm and personable, we don’t quite know how to react and we often react defensively and suspiciously, thereby sabotaging what could be a lovely encounter.  When we are expecting to have a good time and things turn out to be miserable, we have a hard time adjusting.  As long as life comes at us in ways that we expect either for good or bad, we know how to deal with it. 

In order for there to be a crisis of faith for any of us, the outcome of some faith issue has to violate some preconceived idea of ours about how faith works, or how God works.  Frankly, that happens all the time because ,when it comes down to it, we have some pretty unrealistic expectations of what it means to have God’s blessing.  The early Hebrews were given the sacred task of showing all of the world what God was like.  They were supposed to show all of the rest of us, who did not know God, who God is, what is important to Him, and what He wants from us.  They spent some three thousand years doing that pretty badly. 

For a long time, they presented God as rewarding goodness and punishing badness.  And all of us know that idea really doesn’t hold up too well in this life.  We hold out hope that those scales will be balanced in the next life, because we sure do know that they don’t balance in THIS life.  All too often, the good man is taken advantage of and is cheated of everything that he has rightfully earned by the bad man who managed to get elected to congress. So, when the bad man is successful, it creates a faith struggle for many of us.  How could that be, we ask? Where is God in all of this?

Many of you may not know this; but the book of Genesis was not the first book of the bible that was written.  The oldest book of the bible is actually the book of Job.  And that book spends some 42 chapters struggling with the question of why justice does not prevail in life. Our expectations are that justice are an important part of God’s will for reation.  And it seems a pretty major violation of God’s will the way life turns out for most of us.  And that is why almost all of us will encounter, to a lesser or greater extent some crisis that stretches our faith to the breaking point.

Many of us experience one faith crisis after another for years, or even for decades.  That any of us reach the end of our lives with any trust in God left is a testimony to the resilience of human beings and the strength of the faith that is within us. It is the faith that God put in us that carries us through the storms of life.

The people whom we should most pity are the ones who are looking to God to provide a warm, fuzzy, comfortable, secure life with no stresses and no challenges. It seems that they have traded in their faith for the hope of a comfortable and easy life. But because life, by its very nature, is hard, those who expect soft, will be terribly disappointed. These are the people whose expectations will be violated at every turn.  These are the people who will be in crisis at every hour of every day.  And that is all because they expect of God that he is growing sheep and not men and women of strength.