questioning my beliefs

You know, sometimes I look around and wonder, "Is everybody faking it?" I guess I don't mean faking it in a devious way, I just mean in a "maybe if I pretend hard enough it will be true" kind of way.

Sometimes I stop and think, "Oh my gosh this is seriously CRAZY! How can this possibly be true? It doesn't even make sense."

Truth.
Something has to be true. Not everything can be true. As nice and tolerant and friendly as that idea seems, it is intellectual suicide. Maybe nothing that we humans have come up thus far is true. But it can't all be true.

I am queen of middle ground. I am good at mediating. My personality hates excluding others. I don't like to compete. I ran track in high school for the practices, not the meets. I HATED the meets. Why does someone have to lose so that someone else can win? It makes no sense to me. Plus, I wasn't very fast.

I don't like telling people they are wrong. Unless it is my husband. No, I mean on issues that are close to their heart. I know a wonderful older lady who is so passionate and brave and strong. But I feel that she finds her identity in the republican party. She believes that the republican party is America's ultimate Truth. To a point where I don't think she really uses her own brain. I would never tell her she is wrong to swallow anything and everything republican. I have honestly never even entertained the idea. I guess what I think is that there are very few things worth saying, "You are wrong" to someone. I REALLY believe the world is full of a lot of gray areas. This is mainly in part because I believe this world is fallen from it's ideal and perfect beginning. It is amazing to me that there is one thing that every single person in the whole world in every time and every nation can agree on. And that is this:

something's gone terribly wrong here.

and we are spending our entire lives trying to figure out what it is and how to fix it.

Christianity. I was raised as a Christian. Protestant. I used to loathe Catholics. Baptizing infants seemed ridiculous to me. One time I went to a Mass with a friend of mine (I was maybe in 3rd grade) and the priest went down the aisle sprinkling Holy Water and a drip hit me square between eyes and I swear I had a headache in that spot the rest of the day (Oh, the power of the mind!). I more recently watched a South Park episode and laughed for 3 weeks straight about their satire on the Mormon faith (they sang a song with the chorus "Dumb-dity-dumb-dumb-dumb" and it still gets stuck in my head sometimes.) John Smiths' found and then "lost" golden tablets were obviously fake.

It is really great to get to know people who believe differently then I do and who are willing to talk about it. I know many Christians who never leave the Christian bubble. It's safe there, you know? Because what if a "non- Christian" asks you a question that you don't have the answer to? After all, Christians do have all the answers. But Christians shouldn't be afraid if they have found the truth.

Truth is truth.
Shouldn't we all be in pursuit of that?

I am just wondering where the line is between faith and foolishness. I could have great faith in a rock. But my strong faith does not make it a god. I can totally not understand something, but that doesn't make it any less true. Ahhh!!!! Can I hope that God will honor my good intentions? In my attempts at humility? In my honesty with myself about how little I really do know? What would He say at the end of my life if I said to Him, "I didn't know the answers. I never took a hard stance. I was afraid of making a mistake. I was afraid of losing you." ?

I REALLY REALLY do believe in God. There is honestly no question in my mind about that. I really truly believe it is the only thing that makes sense of this world, and of us. And, I have felt Him near. Not very often. But I know what I have felt and it was outside of me. It was something Other. And it was good. These two beliefs are the foundation of my life. If I didn't believe in God, my life would feel purposeless. And I believe to have purpose is an innate human desire and right. We were made with individual purposes. We are important to someone.

After that it gets confusing. But again, I say, something must be true about who God is and what his relationship to us is. I believe it is vital to our very hearts and souls that we find out. We cannot say god is who you personally believe he is. And there is no such thing as "that is true for you, but this is true for me". Honestly, people. How can we even pretend that works?

I think we are afraid of the Truth. And I think that is because we are, deep down, worried that the Truth will not include us. That there is something wrong with us or it will somehow involve us doing something we don't like, involve us being shown for what we really are, deep down. And not all of that is pretty or something we want others to see.

But I guess I really believe that I shouldn't be afraid.

I think I believe in Jesus. I think i even love him. It makes a strange sort of sense to me that this good God would have to disguise himself in order to woo us, in hopes of getting us to fall in love with Him.


I want to be honest. I think we all should be honest. And hopeful. I think we should be hopeful.