Sustenance

sustenance

1.	means of sustaining life; nourishment.

2.	means of livelihood.

3.	the process of sustaining.

4.	the state of being sustained.

I think we, in the North-American culture, have a difficult time picturing God as our sustainer. I mean, for the most part we don't have an issue with viewing Christ as our Saviour, or Jesus as Lord and Master. That's simply ingrained theology from the time when we were prayed with next to our bedsides. God as Sustainer, however, has more difficulties.

I believe this is because we're really quite self-reliant in this post-Starbucks world. We no longer have any needs; we live in a world of our wants. Safeway, in all reality, is our sustainer. It is Save-On-More that provides for our physical nourishment, it is BC Hydro that accommodates our electrical necessities, and it is our paycheck that continues those services in our favour. My daily bread comes not from the Lord, but from minimum-wage's benevolent hand. Our mental stresses can be overcome with the power of positive thinking, and our emotional needs can be quelled, to the point of submission, by a variety of biologically and chemically manufactured prescriptions. In the quest to reduce human pain and suffering, our society has fabricated a world that no longer needs God.

I think that here, at CBC especially, we've idolized and idealized the idea of suffering. We learn about the heroes of church and Anabaptist history and we dream of having the faith to put our lives on the line for the praise of God's holy name. We believe that one day, when someone puts a gun to our head, we'll have the strength and courage to proclaim our faith to the nations. This, we think to ourselves, is truly suffering for the Christian faith. In a dream world of extreme situations, God exists in a seemingly desolate world. However, in the mundane Earth we currently reside in, God abandons us when we encounter the mildest of inconveniences. I think that we've forgotten that the martyrs first had to go through extreme physical and mental suffering before they were able to lay down their life. Surely they were held malnourished, beaten, and tortured for some time before their death. The knowledge of your family suffering because of your unwillingness to deny your faith, or being completely separated from your friends and fellow believes would be utter anguish. Dying is easy; suffering takes eyesight beyond the physical world in front of us.

I don't hold a theology of suffering. I don't believe that I have to be killed for my faith to be a real Christian. I do, however, recognize that the apostle Paul calls us to join with him in suffering for the faith. I have no problem with the fantastical impression of dying for my faith, in fact, I welcome Hollywood-esque moments into my life regularly. I do have a problem with suffering through broken relationships, stress, or the flu because of my faith. Surely, if God were real, he would have prevented these cumbersome annoyances from penetrating into my life of faith.

No. If I accept the theology of God as my sustainer, I will begin to recognize that God will get me through all things. He will give me the strength that I need for the day; or the moment that I am suffering and in pain. He will provide me with the encouragement to keep fighting, he will love me when I need to be loved. He will feed me when I need to be fed, and give me rest when I am too tired to go on. He will light my path only when it is too dark for me to see for myself. When I believe these things to be true, my relationship with God shifts from the stagnant binary to a wholesome organic where I am given just what I need, not what I desire.