so i’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the coming year and what lies ahead. there is no small amount of trepidation in my head as i look forward to what is before me. i have one more year to get school done, with no safety net. though i am incredibly excited about it, it’s scares the ever loving piss out of me.
my faith is something i haven’t taken seriously for a while. i’ve been in and out on the christianity bit for many reasons, not the least of which is the doubts that i have in my heart about God, my mission in life, and the implementation of both of these in realistic ways in my life. i find that i spend too much time thinking about my faith and not enough just shoving aside doubts and being decisive.
it’s not that i’m just doubting and indecisive that kills me, because when i get fastened to an ideal i plow on reckless abandon with no thoughts of failure. i know i have a bulldog personality at times, especially when i know that i am right, and i think that happens with a lot of people. when we know we’re right it’s so incredibly easy to just plow through whatever doubts people have about us or are mission.
but it’s this very thing that i’ve been thinking of. faith isn’t about certainty, and there’s a heck of a lot of uncertainty in my life these days. i long for the days when i was younger and more naive and positively following what i thought was right. this had taught me some unfortunate lessons.
lessons like the human mind can grasp concepts that i know believe are beyond it. things like it is about what i believe and how i can implement these things.
but that’s not what my faith is about.
i’ve believed this for a long time, but never had the chance to demonstrate it.
now with this uncertainty i’ve learned that i have had a very selfish faith.
not as i asking for God for things for my sole benefit, but as in it was about how much i could understand, and i took great pride in the concepts i slid under my belt with each passing week.
with each week for the past five or six years i’ve examined things that many don’t to see if i could hash them out and finally answer them. this was folly, and i know realize that the more you learn, the deeper you delve into how little we can understand.
this frightened me.
i finally rushed up against topics i couldn’t honestly get an answer to.
this weakened my resolve.
i always thought that if given the time we could understand the deep mysteries of God.
i can’t.
no matter how deep we look, there’s always some new paradox, something so basically contradictory to how our minds are wired that i have realized that faith isn’t something i can understand. in this uncertainty, i thought that maybe these things meant that there was no God.
but in this uncertainty i’ve come to understand how selfish this is. i wanted to understand, and i still seek to, but there is no way that we can grasp all there is to know about God.
this realization caused me to lessen my resolve to go on, and i stagnated. but i’ve grown tired of inaction. my only prayer is that i can embrace the uncertainty and pursue God and his ways with reckless abandon. action in the face of uncertainty is my weakness, but perhaps this is the essence of faith.
0 people said::
Post a Comment