On the Outside Looking In

Lately, I've been part of various discussions around faith. The questions range from what is faith? How do you have faith? Does faith even make sense, particularly if you are a logical person? If you didn't grow up in, how do you get past all of the craziness of the Bible stories? I'll touch on the first question today and maybe the others in subsequent posts.

For us logical people, emotional stuff isn’t necessarily natural. Logic always reigns supreme so knowing that faith is believing in something you will never see or prove will be hard. Faith is kind of like a theory in that it's not repeatable or provable. There are many theories out there that are taken as fact even though they can't be proven simply because they make the most logical sense. My outlook is, “What have I really lost by believing this? If it’s true, then I have gained a lot, but if it’s not, then how is my life worse?”  My in-laws may roll their eyes a little, but they'll still love/tolerate me.

If you think about the wind - you know it's there. You feel it. You can see the effects of the wind. You can't put food coloring in the wind and all of the sudden see it though - you can just see it pick up a leaf. You know the wind is there...but there really isn't a way to see it. I have benefited a lot from my faith in God and following the ways of Jesus but proving it is like asking to see the wind. 

Somethings we just can’t understand, and while I know that answer may infuriate many, I look at it like this. I’m not great in string theory. Quantum physics doesn’t appeal to me even one bit…but just because I don’t fully understand quantum physics doesn’t mean there isn’t any value in it. So I make the decision to believe almost logical in a sense. I get more out of life believing it than I would otherwise.

I think love can feel that way at times - it’s not always a bunch of chemical reactions going off (dopamine, norepinephrine, etc) and making you feel giddy or excited…it’s a decision to be committed regardless of how you feel. And for us logical people, I think faith can feel like that too. At some point, you do just have to decide if it's worth believing or not.

And if it is, we probably aren’t the ones who are going to gush about how we feel or when God talks to us, it may result in a 1 sentence statement (or maybe 2) instead of a 20-minute storytelling session.

But it isn’t less real, it’s just different.