A NEW APPRECIATION FOR FAITH
I consistently maligned faith during my stint as an Atheist, but was terribly confused and ultimately mistaken during that season of my life. It wasn't that I drew the wrong conclusion; more that I never really understood what faith really is. I thought it was belief in a set of unverifiable truth claims, but that's an exceedingly narrow and incomplete characterization.
Growth is grounded in belief, what I now consider to be the bedrock upon which everything rests, what I believe drives everything that comes after. These beliefs are often unconscious, but must become conscious and subjected to the light of truth. For from them spring attitudes, from attitudes thoughts, from thoughts feelings, and from feelings actions. This natural flow can run upstream sometimes, but not for long. Belief always wins in the end. If a person wants to change, he must change what he believes deep within his soul.
If a person believes that good times lay ahead, this belief filters through the hierarchy, the characteristics of this belief cascading down to every stage in the stream. If a person believes the opposite, its effects will bear much different fruit in the end. A person who believes himself capable of facing the difficulties of life charts a much different trajectory than another who does not. And in this I recognized faith's integral part in real, lasting transformation. What I believe matters.
Sometimes it's hard to believe the best about this world, particularly about myself, when I behold the brokenness that runs rampant here. But in this brokenness I see change - a slow, steady evolution that our brief time on this planet makes difficult to grasp. I see how life emerged from nothing many billions of years ago, how it has thrived, how it has become more complex and more conscious, how it has been subjected to unimaginable hardship and yet has survived and become so much more - and it fills me with both an indescribable sense of awe and a deep, abiding belief that God has never abandoned life and never will. He lives in the field, and his imprint imbues it with tendencies that slowly, inexorably trend toward an end we cannot fully envision, but have a sense of - a reality in which we someday become all we imagine and everything God created us to be.