In Retrospect

At some time in my life Christ was real to me, as real as the couch in my den. Now I sit after moving back to and spending time in the town I grew up in, back to dealing with the family I grew up with and all the questions that come with it, questioning where I have placed my faith in general. In retrospect, I find that I have lived with this question longer than I thought and have been in denial for a large part of it.

I had a discussion with a person, with whom I hope to build more of a relationship, today about faith and what its role in life is. And more importantly how and on what our faith is built.

During this discussion the point was made to me that the amount of faith I have is, while not irrelevant, not all that important. The importance of faith is not the faith in and of itself, the importance of faith comes from what you put your faith in or the "foundation" your faith is placed on, not how much faith you have. For example, I can be looking out over a frozen pond and, though the ice on the pond is too thin to support my weight, have all the faith in the world that I can skate across that pond, the strength of my faith in the ice is irrelevant because I will fall through. On the flip side, if that same pond is frozen solid, but I have no faith in the ice holding me, skating on the pond is no problem because, again the lack of my faith in the ice is irrelevant, the ice is thick enough to support me. In this instance either the ice will hold or it won't, the amount of my faith in the ice is of no consequence, I only need to be to stay upright on the skates, and then the more times I skate on the ice my faith in the ice will grow.

The spiritual side of this is that the amount of our faith in Christ, while it is important that we have some, is of little consequence. The more we decide to put our faith, however small, in Him, the more He will prove himself and the more our faith grows. I have, for some time, found my faith shrinking and due to some things that have happened in my personal and family life, I was questioning where my faith is placed. Now I find myself in a place of better understanding, not of faith, but of the foundation our faith is based on, and through that understanding my faith, while not increased, has become more stable.

Faith is something every person has and what I have come to realize is that faith is built by life experience, built by placing faith in something and letting that faith grow. Now the question comes, what do we put our faith in? There are a lot of people that put their faith in things which are not "concrete" and, while I won't go into great detail about what those things are, I will only ask this one rhetorical question, what have we put our faith into, and what ever that is....look back on history and ask ourselves how "concrete" that particular thing(the economy, our friends, our whatever) is?

The Bible and God's work in peoples lives have always been a positive thing. Now I'm not saying that bad things don't happen to people who placed their faith in Him, I'm saying that whatever has happened in those peoples lives has always made those people a stronger, more well rounded, more faith filled people. Why is that? Because, whatever happened, they came out the other side of that difficulty with a new appreciation of the ability of God to turn all things around for the benefit of that person. I remember a time when I was in the rebellion mode that I was determined to live my life my way and NOTHING could change my mind, ....and then God( oh how much more those words mean to me now)... placed into my world the most wonderful person on earth, my wife. When we met I was in a place of drug and alcohol abuse that I managed to hid from her for a while. As we talked I came to the realization that she would not give me the time of day, outside a friendship, as long as I was in that place, so I quit, just like that, I quit. We dated for about a year and then broke up. During the following year we kept in loose contact, but I still could not get her off of my mind, despite my going back into the drug/alcohol abuse, I could not forget her. I had a car accident (no I was not intoxicated at the time of the accident) and she drove in from over an hour away to check on me. During that visit, I discovered that she had been struggling with her thoughts about me and we decided to give it another go. At that point I made up my mind to quit, once a for all, the abuse of the things that were holding me back. Then during another visit she made, we decided to get married and gave our families a very short time frame to get used to the idea. We got married that year. I can now say that she has been the best thing to happen in my life. Why did I share that here? Only to point out this fact...my wife and I met through someone we both knew, my wife knew her from working with her and I knew this person because it was at this persons house I did most of my alcohol abuse. God, in His infinite wisdom, used my bad choices to place into my life the one person that could make me want to be better than I was. Now I could, looking back over life as a whole, give you many more examples like this one, but I don't need to. My "foundation" has proven Himself over and over to be firm and unchanging. Can that be said of the "foundation" for our faith today? It can for mine, for in the words of Joshua 24:15 "as for me and my house, we will serve(and have faith in) the Lord." Parenthesis added by me.

I hope that in some small way this has made you think. I leave you with this food for thought:

If your faith is not built on the one and only "concrete" foundation I hope that you will examine that foundation, and then move your faith according to what you find.