Being a member of the Speech and Debate team, it can be said that arguing comes pretty naturally to me. When I was younger, before my spiritual transformation, I argued against faith. I was all about the facts. I'd say "sure Jesus existed but what proof do you have that he rose?" and every time somebody would answer with the only truthful answer a person can give to that question "Faith" I would lose it. What kind of response was that? That wasn't factual proof? Were they idiots? Fools? Faith is the blind man's crutch, I'd say. You see, I thought this meant that faith enabled the blind to continue stumbling onwards, or that it was a characteristic of the ignorant.
Now, I wonder if my interpretation was incorrect. I mean, logically, the walking stick of a blind man is not the source of his blindness. In fact, a blind man's walking stick is, in fact, his eyes. And while I understand the literary symbolism of blindness being ignorance, I think that literature analysis's have it all wrong. It seems, to me, that those who are blind must have a heightened sensitivity to the world around them in order to compensate for such a loss. C.S. Lewis's description of faith seems a far more accurate stance – "I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen, not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else." But this is for you to figure out, not for me to argue.
The point of this blog then... when things are really hard, it is tempting and easy to lose perspective and to grow angry with God, to lose faith. Believe me, I say this with no judgement, for I am a hypocrite in even writing this. However this is the beauty of Christianity. When God gave Adam and Eve the chance to choose Him over the fruit, He gave humanity free will. This free will is not just true for whether or not we will follow Him, but it is also true for if we will continue to follow Him. If you have ever read or seen Harry Potter you can understand this idea. Time after time, Harry offer's Ron and Hermione the chance to turn back, to stop tagging along. God is constantly offering us the chance to turn around. And when things get hard, when we must bear our own cross, when we get scared, or meet the unknown it is beyond tempting not to drop your cross and run. But we do have a second option. A second, glorious and beautiful option. We can choose to follow Him. We can choose to delight Him. I want you to think about that for a minute. You can delight the heart of the Divine Spirit. Can you envision such delight? Have you experienced it? If you haven't, I can hardly explain it to you. It would be like a child trying to explain the excitement of Christmas to another child who has never heard of Christmas. Try to envision a time in which you gave someone something truly amazing, imagine the look on their face and how it made you feel and then multiply that by about 20 billion. But alas, I digress. My point is, in those struggles, in those hard times we have a choice. We can walk away from our faith or we can stick with it. But it is far more than that. We can also choose to obey and trust God, or not.
See the beautiful thing about faith is that you can choose to have faith in whatever you would like. It doesn't make it right, or wrong. It just is. You get to choose. I'm sure you can see the choice I'm attempting to live out. You, however, have your own choice to make. So make it, own it, live it.
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