Laura’s Reviews > A Force of Will: The Reshaping of Faith in a Year of Grief > Status Update

I told him how embarrassed I was to waste his time looking for non-existent shirts. About how silly I felt to have him see me like this, dependent and adrift all at the same time. But he understood that this wasn't about clothes, not at all. "No," he said. "These are the things that matter."

I still needed to buy handkerchiefs for the funeral, plus black socks and black boxer shorts. ... As we left the store and I drove to the Metro, I woke up to reality. It was a Saturday night, and his friends had been cooking all day in anticipation for a low-key gettogether with him as honored guest. Only my silly shirt boondoggle had made him miss most of it. Chagrined, I apologized for keeping him from his friends.

I tried to be calm, to act as if I didn't mind. Like I was just as happy to wear my black suit and black tie, with black shoes and a white shirt. Like every other funeral I've attended. But i wasn't and I didn't have any more time to do anything more about it. I wouldn't be able to present my most honest self, clad entirely in black, to those gathered at the funeral.

It was a life, but it was a life without Will. That old life was a mirage, if it ever really existed. It was gone from my grasp, impossible to reclaim. I just wanted my old normal.

We trust that God is ahead of us, and all around us, leading us and loving us and preparing us for what's next.

We shape it as best as we can and then let it be shaped by God, ourselves, and our community. Maybe faith is only and ever palliative, intended to start us on a journey of eternal collaboration with our maker. We exert a lifetime of effort at growing and developing our best understanding of God and the world, and at living the kind of lives that tunes us into the music of the creator and that fulfill God's hopes.

Like a writer's drafts, or a backpacker's tent, or a scientist's hypothesis, or a gardener's weeding, or a parent's relationship with a child, our present faith only needs to work for its appointed time and should in fact be flexible, temporary and transitory.

Our faith ought not to be a faith that chooses belief over practice, and it shouldn't be selfish or self-interested; it ought to be a faith that works for us, yes, but one that benefits those around us even more than ourselves, and which calls us to the ultimate end to which we're called- a greater capacity to love. If it looks inward, it ought to do so such that it can give outward in ever increasing measure.

When our lives are shaken, we may doubt the most basic of convictions and shift the pieces around in our matrix of belief until we find some stability.

Just as the surgery that saved my son was developed through successes and failures of patients like him, so my faith is built on the necessarily limited viewpoints of my religious teachers (profs, parents, friends, and others) and-God-willing- will be reworked and refined by those who come after me.