Therefore we are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord. For we live by faith, not by sight.
2 Corinthians 5:6-7 (NIV)
Confident While Still Away
The gym lights are on out there and the fluorescent tube in here has a rattle in it. Eight people in their forties are getting changed slowly. They signed up together in April as a rec league team and they’ve lost every match since, and they’re bad in the particular way adults are bad at a sport they took up late, with plenty of effort and no timing at all. One of them hasn’t taken his knee pads off. A phone goes off in a bag and gets silenced through the canvas. The room has gone quiet, and it’s been that way long enough that breaking it would cost something.
God fashioned people for this very purpose and gave them the Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come. Therefore we are always confident, Paul writes, and we know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord. We live by faith, not by sight.
Both halves of that are true at the same time. These are people who are certain of God and a long way off from him, and Paul treats the distance as the ordinary condition of anyone alive in a body. God gave them his Spirit as the deposit on what’s coming, and he put it down in advance the way you do when you fully mean to come back for the rest. Some of what he promised has already landed on them.
Plenty of people would rather have the other kind of certainty, and there’s nothing wrong with wanting it. God gave a guarantee that can’t be held up to the light, and he gave it to people who’ll spend their whole lives away from home and be sure of him the entire time.
The next team starts coming in with their bags, loud, already arguing about a work schedule. They have no idea how the last hour went in here and it wouldn’t occur to them to ask. The room fills up with people who weren’t there.
A Prayer to Remember
God, I’d rather have proof than have you, and I’ve spent years arranging my faith so it needs less trust than it should. You gave your Spirit as the guarantee of what’s coming, and I didn’t think that up myself. Tonight I’d like to live like a man who believes you.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
