Sundays equalled church. That was all I knew growing up. I was told there is God, and that he didn’t like naughty little children. In a sense I saw God as a humorless sod, always trying to rain down on little children’s parade. In high school, I wasn’t sure anymore and so didn’t go to church that often. By college, I was telling everyone who would listen to me that there just couldn’t be God. It makes absolutely no sense for there to be a god.
Funny thing is, I found myself talking to this girl right before I graduated college. I wanted to know why she believed in God. Honestly, I don’t remember what she said, but as I listened to her it appeared to me that to believe in God has very little to do with logic, it is a choice. The decision to believe must be made based on whatever your convictions are, and must be supported by faith, then whatever follows…I don’t know what follows. When the logic card goes up into the air, everyone wants to talk about how foolish it is to do anything that makes no sense to our intellect. It is funny because most of the things that has brought me immense joy went against logic. And who said our intellect is as high as we like to believe it anyway? We do all these very smart things and are still unhappy. We know that we do not know but we insist we know.
I made the decision to believe in God for the same reason I stopped believing in God. There are just too many questions. I believe now that the fact that there are so many questions is reason enough that there is an entity who knows all the answers, and I owe it to myself to seek this entity. That we do not know all the answers could be that we are not prepared to know them. Or that we are blind to them? I don’t know.
We all say, how can there be God when the world is full of so much pain and evil. Well, how can there not be God when the same world is also full of beauty and good. Why is there pain? Who causes pain? It seems to me that we cause each other pain. We have “free will” after all. To do as we think best, or as pleases as best.
There is God. I believe this. What is God? I don’t know. I believe though that God is good and God is life, and God is in everything and is therefore in us. Sometimes when I feel the wind, when someone is kind to me, when I see a child laugh, when it rains, when a stranger smiles at me, when I wake up into another day, it is hard to not believe that there is a creator behind all of these. It is hard to brush it off as being a mere coincidence. It seems that there is always an artist behind a piece of art, and what is life if not the greatest piece of art? Why should the credit then be denied to its artist? And if the world is beyond our comprehension, is it not arrogant and foolish to believe ourselves capable of rationalizing it?
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a beautiful post Jane– xo : )