No Atheists in Foxholes

So the saying goes. I think the meaning is clear - when the chips are down and life is at stake, there are very few people stubborn enough to face that moment alone. But I would add something to the old saying. There are also no atheists in waiting rooms. Having spent considerable time in waiting rooms of hospitals over the past year, you can’t help but notice how the complex faith of the super-spiritual becomes simple, how the simple faith of the barely believing comes to the forefront, and how the non-existent faith of the faithless suddenly rears its head. People believe in waiting rooms because it is in there that you find yourself in a position of helplessness. You don’t know the difference between a fracture and a break, between Amoxicillin and Penicillin, or between a short beep and a long one from an IV machine. You just know that you don’t know. And you want to believe that there is someone who does.

But I think it goes beyond that, too. I would say that in waiting rooms, not only are there no atheists, there are also no white people. There are no black people. There are no rich, no poor, no smart, and no stupid. There are just people. That leads me to this… perhaps the one thing that unites the human experience more than anything else is our shared pain. Everybody has it, and everybody has been wounded from it. That’s how we are all alike.

The differences seem to come in how different people deal with their pain. Some drink it away, others “church” it away. Both of which, in my opinion, are simply forms of medication designed to keep us from dealing with the reality of life. From my admittedly cynical viewpoint, there are far too many sermons preached that attempt to 8:28 people - that is, to tell people that their questions, doubt, fear, and pain are wrong and are somehow resultant from a lack of faith. We would do better to help people freely acknowledge what countless prophets from the Bible did - acknowledge that life is hard.

Maybe spiritual development has more to do with that than we realize. Show me a person who walks deeply with Christ and I will show you a person who has felt the devestating effects of living on this planet. Show me someone with faith that has substance and I’ll show you someone who doesn’t answer difficulty with pithy sayings and realizes the mystery involved in suffering. Do we really spend enough time in church helping people voice those things that Christians try to bury, or are we too concerned about people’s tithing habits to dwell on that sort of stuff?

John Calvin said this: “True and sound wisdom consists in 2 parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But, while joined by many bonds, which one precedes and brings forth the other is not easy to discern.” Translation - to be in touch with God is also to be in touch with you. To know Him is to know yourself. And to know either is to recognize the pain of real life.