F is for Faith

F is for Faith –

“You just have have to trust.”  “You just have to believe.”  “You just have to have faith.”  Those were phrases I heard, as a child, from my dad when I was in the midst of my millionth time of asking the “but how”, ‘but why”, “but where” questions that I asked on a regular basis.  He was always so calm, incredibly patient and never made me feel like my questions and frustrations were wrong or that I shouldn’t be asking them.  I think that if He had made me feel bad for asking, I would have never come to the place I did in accepting faith as it is.

I am a thinker.  I am concrete sequential.  I am a realist. I never had a difficult time believing that God existed or that He sent His Son to die for my sins or that I needed a Savior.  However, I “needed” to know the answers to all my burning questions. Questions like, why people with different color skin exist if we all came from Adam and Eve, how did the animals know to come to the ark, how did Adam name all those animals, why do bad things happen, and the list went on and on and on… I think the one that I got most hung up on was “where did God came from?”.  I had a difficult time wrapping my young mind around the fact that He has always existed!

I’m not sure how or why, but one of those nights, it clicked.  Faith made sense to me.  I may never be able to completely wrap my mind around the fact that God always been there, but it doesn’t matter.  I finally realized that I had to just believe that everything He said was true and stop worrying about it.  My mom frequently says, “He either IS who he says He is, or He isn’t”.  Don’t get me wrong, I still question things that happen.  I still get frustrated when I feel like He isn’t answering some of my prayers, but I eventually come back to that phrase and know that He is who He says He is and He IS in control.  I can rest assured that He has me in the palm of His hand – caring for me like no one else can.

About the same time in life that I was the “questioner extraordinaire”, I received a little orange autograph book.  My dad wrote a silly poem in there about loving me more than pork and beans, but after he signed it, he added the reference Proverbs 3:5-6.  To this day, it is one of my favorites!!  After all those times of discussion he knew that if I could take this to heart, it would carry me through so many difficult times in my life.  “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.  In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight.”  [NASB]   That my friends, is faith.

Being a Christian is not about knowing all the answers.  In fact, it is quite the opposite.  It is accepting that we don’t have all the answers. That we can’t make it on our own.  Knowing that God understands us when we question.

There is a power much greater than ourselves that is the driving force in the universe.  A divine being who could have obliterated this world thousands of years ago, but chose instead to send His Son because He loves us!  If we can weave into our beings the trust that Proverbs 3:5-6 tells about, our lives can be so much richer.  And as the following verse says, faith is “the firm foundation under everything that makes life worth living.”

Hebrews 1:1  “ The fundamental fact of existence is that this trust in God, this faith, is the firm foundation under everything that makes life worth living. It’s our handle on what we can’t see.” [The Message]