Subscriber Questions 1

The subscriber chat has quietly become my favourite corner of this whole thing. You ask better questions than most interviewers I’ve sat across, mainly because you’re not trying to catch anyone out!

We’re all trying to get through our own storms. So every month or so I’m going to take questions head on. This first time round I’ve started with the three that come up more than any others, in the chat, in messages, and everywhere else we go.

“How do you keep faith when your prayers don’t get answered?”

I won’t dress this up. We have all prayed for things with everything in us and watched them not happen, and I’m no exception. Anyone who tells you faith spares you that hasn’t walked far on it yet.

What I’ve learned, slowly and with some bruises, is that we get faith and outcomes tangled together. We treat prayer like a transaction. Coins in, result out, and when the machine doesn’t pay, we kick it. I’ve done my share of kicking. The faith that has actually held me is less like a vending machine and more like the rope I keep going on about. The rope doesn’t promise the weather will be kind. It promises I won’t fall alone through it.

And this matters: faith that has only ever known sunshine isn’t much of a rope. Every person I know whose faith carries real weight got it the same way, through seasons where the answer was no, or worse, silence, and they stayed tied in anyway. If that’s where you are, you’re not failing at faith. You’re in the middle of the part that forges it.

“How do you start again when you’ve lost everything?”

Small and ugly. That’s the honest answer. Forget the montage.

When my back was broken, the road to Everest did not begin with anything heroic. It began with movements so small you’d have thought Everest was and impossible dream.

If you compare day one of the rebuild with the life you had, you’ll drown. Compare it only with yesterday. Losses that big are grieved and walked at the same time, and neither one waits politely for the other to finish. Do the small thing today, then again tomorrow. Mountains have never been climbed any other way.

“What do you do when the courage runs out?”

Nobody has ever found a way to feel brave on demand, and we can stop trying. Courage has almost nothing to do with how we feel. It’s a direction. Fear says move away, courage means moving forward anyway, usually with our legs shaking. Every jump I’ve ever done, my body voted no. It got outvoted.

There’s a line in the Psalms I hold onto in those moments: when I am afraid, I put my trust in you. Notice it doesn’t say if. The fear is assumed. The trust is what we do with it. So when the courage runs out, lower the bar. You don’t need to feel brave for the whole war, just move forward for the next five minutes. Then the five after that. Strung together, those five-minute stretches look exactly like courage. They are exactly like courage.

Keep them coming

The next mailbag is a few weeks out, and the chat is open.

Next Sunday, Anchor Points continues with part three: training in the rain.

Never Give Up.

Bear