On Faith.

I listened to a sermon about faith, and what faith is, and the pastor basically defined it (or my interpretation of how he defined it) as this feeling of being suddenly aware that in spite of not having all the answers to all the questions, you feel this sort of bond to God, wherein you realize He'll give you everything you need all while loving you more than you can imagine.

He started reading from Hebrews, chapter 11, which to be honest, in my head, was an Old Testament book (Hebrews? How is that not Old Testament?) which proved to me that I still don't have a clue about anything, even after more than a year of studying...

Verse 1:
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

So basically, if I get it right, hope is baseless and kind of like blowing bubbles into the wind unless it's based in faith.

When I was a young teen and was really depressed, drank too much too often and didn't feel any reason to keep going, I'd often wonder about God. I'd never felt Him, and I came to the conclusion that if I decided to believe in God, it'd be just to have something to lean on, something to give me a sort of unearned, imaginary, false hope. I really didn't see God as anything but a crutch to ease the mind and being a girl who liked things difficult and liked the feeling of accomplishment that came with overcoming on my own whatever it was that knocked me over without help, I didn't need that crutch. I was strong enough, angry enough, and resentful enough to pick myself up and power through the pain alone.

And I really was alone. I'd distanced myself from everybody, ruined my relationship with my dad and my brothers, and annoyed my friends with my cynicism and negativity. I set myself up to have nobody.

Somehow, I overcame a lot of that, fell down a few more times and found myself in a place in my life where I was happy. I told the guy I was with that there was no way I'd ever find God but in the happy times. When I'd need Him the least, that's when I'd be open to seeing Him, I thought. That way, my relationship with Him would be based on a choice to love Him rather than an unhealthy dependence.

I decided to learn about Christianity, and then one night, after a friend of mine from blogland had given a kidney to her brother and text messaged me, "Pain pain pain" from her hospital bed, I felt helpless. I was an eleven hour drive away, and even if I had been close, there was nothing I could do. There was nothing I could do to relieve her pain. So I tried praying.

But praying when you don't believe in God is exactly what I feel that this verse is about. I would hope so hard that she'd be ok, that her pain wouldn't be so terrible, that the doctors and nurses who were supposed to be tending to her would wake up and help. But that hope was nothing. My words might have sent ripples of air out from me, but they stopped before even leaving the room. My hope was useless and baseless, and this was the first time in my life I'd ever felt the need for my hope to mean something.

As an agnostic growing up in a home that wasn't so perfect, I learned really early on that life is just not fair, you don't get what you wish for and that not too much in this world is under your control, so too bad. And when my grandmother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and was given three or so days to live, even though she was the only real mother figure I'd ever had, I was ok with the prognosis. This is life. Life ends. That's just the way it goes. It never occurred to me to pray for her or to hope for her. All I did was say goodbye.

Well, she ended up living a couple of years in misery after enduring round after round of fruitless chemo. And still, watching her suffer, I never thought to pray.

I loved my grandmother with all my heart, but this was a scientific thing. The HRT was probably responsible. The chemo didn't work. Her body was shutting down. It's all science. There's nothing you can do to fight science. That's just the way life is.

But here was my friend Megan, who had just finished the Ironman, who just gave her kidney to her brother and now was in an unimaginable amount of pain. Where's the science in that? If there is any, it's by far exceeded by the practical aspects of it being overwhelmingly confusing. Giving an organ away is painful? Aside from the surgery pain, apparently, it's unbelievable. How does that make any sense?

In my emotional state that night, it didn't. And my connection to God, after twenty-eight years of nothingness was still... nothing. My hope was hopeless. So I did what any girl in my position would do: I called a Christian.

"Can you pray for Megan? God doesn't hear me," and somehow, just by telling him that, I felt it'd actually mean something. Somehow, telling a person who I believed at the time had a connection to God made it so God could hear me. I still had no direct connection, but at the same time, I believed his God existed. I had to. It was the only way my hope would mean anything and it had to mean something because my good friend was in incredible pain.

That was the first time in my life where the only option was prayer. And I guess because it wasn't for me, I didn't see it as a crutch so much as a necessity. If it was me, I could suffer through it. But when it's somebody else, somebody you care about deeply, you just wish with all your being that you could take that from them.

But life's not fair. You can't take the pain from them. It just doesn't work that way.

After that night, I tried harder to actively look for God. A pastor had told me to read the Bible one book at a time, but to pray first, and I'd do it, but I didn't know what I was praying for or if I meant it. After that night though, I knew what I was praying for. I was praying for a direct connection. I didn't want a mediator. I wanted to be able to feel it myself. I wanted to make sure the message got there from my heart rather than by having to pass through somebody else's where the intensity and meaning would diminish.

Not long after that, after wholeheartedly fierce work in my Christianity studies, the traffic stopped on the bridge on my way home and I happened to look left. There, I saw God. I found Him. The sun set so amazingly on the water, slipping behind the rolling hills that they call "mountains" here. It was a sunset. I've seen hundreds of sunsets. But this one was perfect. Amongst the dirty, dingy smoggy air that surrounded the cars full of tired, crabby, zoned out commuters, here was this sudden slap of awesome. Every sunset has God in it. Everything has God in it. But it took this particular sunset on this particular day after a long while of working and praying for me to finally have faith.

It's a cheesy story, I know. They generally are. Maybe that's God's point. For those of us expecting some sort of huge exhibition of God simply because we're too rigid in our agnosticism or atheism to assume we'd "fall" for anything less, maybe God's somewhere or everywhere chuckling at how little it actually takes.

Verse 3:
By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible.

Maybe I'm tired, or maybe I'm just feeling it right, but that verse is awesomely poetic. When you stand at the foot of a mountain, or on the beach with massive waves crashing at your feet, is it about what you see? Is it about three dimensional inanimate objects? Or is it about the rush of sensory input and emotion and... life? The combination that occurs for us to feel awe really is supernatural in a way. It's a sort of sudden harmony between all these multifaceted creations. The mountain reflects the light in such a way that we see it. The rocks and trees and other things, living and non, come together in an awesome display that stimulates our senses from the outside in. The cellular processes in our bodies, which, whether you believe in evolution or not, are a miracle in themselves, become altered and stimulate our senses and our soul from the inside out. It really is beyond just the visible realm.

Maybe the amazing combination that leads to awe is a coincidence of evolution, erosion patterns, and all sorts of scientific processes all converging into your one person at one moment in time.

Or maybe, through that intense moment of peace, God is trying to stir up that moment of faith inside your soul, whether it's for the first time or it's to renew it once again.

And yeah, I don't have all the answers and most of the time, I don't even know which way is up. And honestly, a lot of the time, I doubt God and I doubt my faith, but what I don't doubt is that when I allow God to challenge my doubts, He'll always respond by making my faith stronger.

As I've already blogged, this year so far has been pretty difficult, and early on, I really thought my faith was not strong enough to withstand a fall so terrible, but I asked God for help. I asked God for faith. I didn't want Him to become a crutch in my worst times as I'd feared as a teenager. And in the end, He wasn't. Sure, He let me feel His love in my worst moments, but he also let me yell at Him in my worst moments, curse Him in my worst moments. And He didn't let me lose Him. I really don't know how that happened.

I guess He made my hope mean something.