Help My Unbelief

We are on the island in Maine now for almost two weeks. It is such a blessing to be in the quiet, dependent for the most part on candles, starlight, or last night a lightning storm, to give us light. Rain water washes off my salty skin after a dip in the cove. We had a hot and delicious dinner cooked over the fire. I am already loving the slower pace of life and I think that the blogging will be taking a back seat to the musing and gazing.

Yesterday I sat out on the dock and read the Scripture for the day and found there what I consider the most human, most faithful, and most truthful prayer in the Bible. In the Gospel of Mark the disciples have been out practicing their calling of healing and witnessing. They come back to Jesus frustrated because they have not been entirely successful. They were not able to drive away the evil spirits from a young man who had suffered from these seizure-like episodes most of his life. Jesus then spoke to the father of the man who asked Jesus if he is able, could he please just do something. Jesus is pretty affronted that the father doubts the power of faith and says basically that with belief, all things are possible. The father burst out “Oh Lord I believe, help my unbelief!” And Jesus calls out the spirit and heals the boy. When the disciples ask  they why were unsuccessful Jesus tells them that healings like this one need prayer.

So what was the prayer that made the difference? “Oh Lord I believe. Help my unbelief!” A prayer of testimony to the power of God “Oh Lord I believe” and at the same time a prayer of confession “I do not believe” and finally, within those two paradoxical statements, the deep trust that God, here manifest as Jesus, could in fact do what the father did not believe.  The prayer speaks of the deep faith that is manifest when we do not believe (and what human being does not live in that lack of belief/trust most of the time?) and still we somehow have enough trust that we can ask for help. In this prayer we see that belief and trust are interlinked, and maybe are even the same thing under a different name.

That prayer is what the disciples needed to pray. Sure  they could go out in the world and do what they were called to do but they needed, at least in this situation, to stop and admit that they were really as powerless as the afflicted people who they were called to heal. They, and we, could not heal on their own. Like the AA slogan, “fake it till you make it” the disciples needed to pray as the father did, faking their belief, while making their trust stronger by bringing it all back to God, in whom all things are possible.

Oh God I believe. Oh God I trust. Help my unbelief. Help my lack of trust. This is a prayer that I can pray every day, whether I am blessed to be on the island or back at home.