Yes & No

I am reading Philip Yancey's Soul Survivor: How My Faith Survived The Church. Excellent book, and I want to comment more on it later, but I have to share what I just read. Each chapter is about a person who inspired Yancey's faith in some way. His 11th chapther is about Frederich Buechner, a writer and Presbyterian minister... I want to share this quote from one of Buechner's novels, because it's profound to me.

If you tell me Christian commitment is a kind of thing that has happened to you once and for all like some kind of spiritual plastic surgery, I say go to, go to, you're either pulling the wool over your own eyes or trying to pull it over mine. Every morning you should wake up in your bed and ask yourself: "Can I believe it all again today?" No, better still, don't ask it till after you've read "The New York Times, till after you've studied that daily record of the world's brokenness and corruption, which should always stand side by side with your Bible. Then ask yourself if you can believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ again for that particular day. If your answer's always Yes, then you probably don't know what believing means. At least five times out of ten the answer should be No because the No is as important as the Yes, maybe more so. The No is what proves you're human in case you should ever doubt it. And then if some morning the answer happens to be really Yes, it should be a Yes that's choked with confession and tears and ...great laughter. (From The Return of Ansel Gibbs, by Frederick Buechner)