A Thousand Thoughts
Published Tuesday, March 22, 2005 by the Stewart | E-mail this post
There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write. (William Makepeace Thackeray)
This morning I did a phone-interview for a job I'd applied for in Ontario for the summer, at a factory that works with fiberglass. And beautifully enough, I got the job. So I am feeling a bit of relief at the moment, now that I have an idea of where I will be for the summer. The job is a total blessing; it pays well and it's close enough to my parent's house that I can live rent-free for the summer. Phew. God is good.There's a subject I've been thinking of lots for the past few days -- God's goodness. I was thinking about how hard that is to believe sometimes. Perhaps it isn't so much that it is hard to believe as it is to feel. Isn't that how we tend to evaluate our beliefs? I wonder why that is. We believe what we feel. And if we aren't feeling it, we question the depth of our belief. I don't think that is the way it should be, though.I think belief is a choice, like love, that we choose to do or not do. Feeling isn't an ingredient of belief, as much as it is a product of belief. In other words, feeling isn't required to believe something, but sometimes (ie. not all the time) it will result from our choosing to believe something. What that ultimately means, then, is that our intellect does play a big part in what we choose to accept as truth and reject what we see as fiction. This shoots a few holes in what some people call 'blind faith', where we accept something simply because we got goosebumps when we heard it, or because it's what we've grown up hearing.But when we accept that belief is a choice, we lose all of our excuses. We can't say we don't feel like serving God, we can't say we don't
feel like loving our roommate, we can't say we don't feel like helping the less fortunate. It has nothing to do with feeling, and everything to do with choosing to do it. If we believe, we are required to do, regardless of whether we get goosebumps or not. Any worship leader can manipulate a crowd to feel one thing or another -- that's the power of music. But when the music isn't making us feel warm and fuzzy and all tingly inside, and we still choose to worship a God who is above and beyond such human endeavours, that is true belief.I've started reading The Confessions by Saint Augustine, and I am so humbled. I am beginning to see my life in light of the history of the church, and to respect the deep devotion of the people who came before me. It both encourages and inspires me. I've always been a bit put off by the showy (and what I'd call flaky) church services I sometimes go to. And the more I read these books by people who were so devoted to God but didn't have all the hype we do, I am drawn to their kind of faith -- a real, dirty, intimate relationship with Creator God.
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