SHORT POST: Faith

 I started thinking about faith again today while talking to a friend who is still, like a great many of my old friends, unknowingly deep in the muck of institutionalized religion. Earlier this week I was contact by another person who was concerned about my salvation in light of my not keeping the Levitical Holy Days. Together these two conversations really did a number to my mood. I'm 98th percentile Neurotic according to the 'big 5' personality test system, and these kinds of conversations really bring me down. In the majority of these types of conversations I find myself in a corner, not a corner with no answer to questions of faith mind you, but a corner with no chance of explaining myself. In talking to someone who is unknowingly trapped in darkness there is no way to 'explain' what light looks like. 

Faith came to mind because in most cases, at least in most of the times I have heard it preached, faith is seen as the method by which you continue to do what you are already doing, in the belief that doing so will produce different results. For all my past life I never prodded that concept, and thus never noticed the irony in it. This type of faith IS insanity by definition.

I heard a minister say explicitly once that we 'need to have the faith to keep doing what we're doing'. This example happened to be later in my enlightenment and as such it stuck in my mind because of the horrible consequences that instantly sprang to mind. God only knows how many people have been destroyed either mentally or physically from living by such a 'faith'. 

I was trying to explain to this old friend today that progress requires change. The Apostle Paul was literally 'called by God' to preach, yet it was YEARS before anyone listened and 14 years before he had any recognition of credentials. Paul had a calling directly from God but found no friends in Judaism or Christianity. His old friends resented his alleged conversion, and the other Apostles didn't believe that God called him. That's a scenario when real faith meets reality. That faith is not the faith to 'keep doing what you're already doing', that faith is the faith to 'do what has not yet been done'. 

More and more I find layers of truth in "Foxes have holes, and birds have nests but the Son of Man has no place to lay His head.".

I find myself in a corner in these conversations because there is no way to justify my own faith. The religious institutions from which we came disallow ANY variance from their deeply guarded doctrines. For my old friends, not keeping the Holy Days is a 'Go Directly to the 3rd Resurrection and Do Not Pass Go' card. There is simply no ability to question, there is no ability to discuss, there is no ability to read the Bible with an open mind.

In the minds of so many, 'the truth once and for all delivered' does not refer to Christ but to HWA's literature. (You can replace HWA with whoever the founder of whatever your denomination is because the name doesn't matter) In these cases I lose. I cannot defend myself against their fears, nor does my evidence of God's hand in my life lend any weight to the scales. I am simply a deserter to my old religion, and simultaneously (currently to a much lesser degree) unaccredited to my new peers.

I too need more of that faith that Paul had, that all the Prophets had, that Abraham had, the faith to leave the known and go boldly into the unknown. May we all grow in the faith to not need the justification of our peers.

Seth - September 26-2022