Fate-th.......

What is faith? Where does it reside? What causes it? How do we express it?

I pondered all of these questions in church yesterday.

One of our associate pastors was preaching yesterday. He is one of my favorites. His delivery is not polished and his presentation sometimes makes me feel sorry for him - but at the same time, he is real. I get a feeling of genuine faith that absolutely radiates from him at all times. And as I listened to him preach, I was moved to examine the intangible things that go into our perceptions of things such as faith.

I have much faith. I have faith in things that I sometimes wonder why in the world I have faith in them, because I am disappointed time and time again. But my faith remains. Is it my "rose-colored" glasses that do that or is it something inside of me that I can't put my finger on that leads me to understand things that make no sense for me?

There are some things I do know. Without faith, there can be no love because love, like faith, demands confidence without assurance or evidence. With all things spiritual, there is never anything certain. Faith and Love exist beyond reason and evidence. They go much deeper. They go into a place where it is hard to seperate things into neatly organized piles of logic that can be filed and refered to in a time of need or want. They simply exist and are as necessary as breathing for us to live our lives with any sort of hope.

There is always "proof" of our faith if we look hard enough. We see it in nature as we plant a seed and watch a flower grow. We can touch someone and give them strength. We can wipe away the tears and help someone to smile again.

And I think it's true that all of us can begin to be comfortable with our faith as well as our love just as soon as we start to accept it as reality. Faith and love don't have a chance if we are forever questioning it or requiring it to be validated by some evidence of our own choosing.

When I was 10 years old, my most prized possession was stolen. It was a jacket that had all of my championship patches from swimming sewn on it. I know who stole it, I knew why they stole it and I know that they threw it away just for spite. And for weeks I prayed to God to bring it back for me. Nothing. No jacket. No answers. No nothing except sneering from the culprit who neither admitted what he had done or acknowledged that he didn't.

So where was God? How could God allow me to be treated so cruelly?

As I grew older, I came to realize that it is not up to me to determine what had happened and it was very selfish of me to "demand" God return my stuff.

I can only imagine that the theft and disposal of that jacket had an effect on the boy that did it and maybe, just maybe, his life was changed by that act. And maybe that was the lesson I was supposed to glean from that experience. I'm not sure - but to this day I do know that I don't put an emphasis on my belongings anymore and that is a blessing in itself.

So as I swim upstream each day, I am strengthened by the fact that all I am required to do is to honestly respond to the things that I feel and if I am on course, that the outcome will be fine - whether or not I agree with it.

So put that in your pipe and smoke it.