Here is what ambidextrous, or "two-handed" faith (welcoming pleasures with the right hand and afflictions with the left, convinced that both would serve God's design for us) means to me, in theory if not always in practice. I take "everything without exception" as God's action in the sense of asking what I can learn from it and praying for God to redeem it by improving me. I take nothing as God's action in the sense of judging God's character, for I have learned to accept my puny status as a creature - which includes a limited point of view that obscures unseen forces in the present as well as a future known only to God. The skeptic may insist unfairly lets God off the hook, but perhaps that's what faith is: trusting God's goodness despite any apparent evidence against it. As a soldier trusts his general's orders; better, as a child trusts her loving parent.
- 'Reaching for the Invisible God', Chapter 5: Two-Handed Faith, by Philip Yancey
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