Faith, Power and the Universe -- How They Intertwine

#payitforward

I've always been rather fascinated by the debate between those who believe in God and those who don't. I've been on both sides of that coin. I was raised in a church going family. During my teen years, I fled attending church as part of my youthful rebellion. It would be at least a decade before I'd even look at religion again. 

When I did, I came to believe that most humans have an innate sense there are powers greater than themselves which influence their lives. In many ways, faith is a coming to understand that we can't control everything in our life. Power greater than ourselves are at play. 

For me, I came from a Christian background. I perceive that power as God. Not because God is all knowing and has a plan for me that I have to follow. More because I have to have a certain amount of faith that I need to just let some things happen and be open to going with the flow to move myself forward in life. I can only control what I have understanding of, and to a large degree, the future and the potential twists and turns in life -- I don't understand, but I know they will happen. 

My biggest issue with religion, as in organized religion, was the disconnect I saw between what I  was taught at church and what I saw the other six days of the week. It was like, for an hour or two a week, people tried to be Christlike and the rest of the week, whatever was cool. To me it was senseless. 

It would be many years later when I'd hear an Anglican priest sum that up rather well. He was talking about the Eucharist cleansing of us our sins, creating a clean slate, for us to strive to be better people. He paused and then said "Yes, some of us do rather well. Some of us get to the end of the sidewalk before we sin again. We humans are an imperfect bunch."

In my youthful idealism, I expected that anyone who attended church should be perfect and to never do any wrong. When the parents who took me to church, who taught Sunday School and were part of the church would engage in physical or emotional abuse that disconnect between church and life grew ever wider. 

God and religion became irrelevant and something to escape from. 

What I didn't realize at the time was that I was running away from the greatest self-development resource ever written, the bible. I view the bible as a book of delivered wisdom that can help guide me through life. 

It would be over a decade before I formed the maturity to start to understand, we are all broken people. We all have experiences which marks our lives. Some people respond by repeating the cycle, others by making sure the cycle stop. 

Some of the underlying messages of religion never left me, even when I had left it. Those messages were the basics of how to interact in the world and with others. To care about others, to treat others with respect and to reach out to the weaker among us. To strive to do right in a world of wrong. 

The faith thing, well that is a constant learning process. I constantly have to work on finding balance between letting life develop and taking the action to make life develop. It isn't one or the other, it is a mixture. It's a lot easier to remind myself to put something into "God's hands" than to just trust some 'power' that I have no visual concept of. 

My dad once told me how when he was struggling with some problem he would pick up his bible, hold it along the spine and gently flip it until it fell open. He said he would read where it fell open and almost always find a passage that gave him insight into what he was struggling with. 

I sat with him during his last night on earth. During that long night, especially when he got restless, I picked up his bible and would let it flip open as he described he did. I would start to read to him. He'd settle as I read and I was rather surprised to find the words I was reading, were words of comfort about loss. 

I could have probably looked those passages up, instead, the universe provided them when they were needed most.