Foolish Faith

How often is it that you feel like a fool? I guess maybe i get that feeling more than others, this week i felt like a bit of a fool on a climbing and falling trip while watching groups of young kids and trying to compare myself to a 12 year old dirl who we watched scoot up these rock faces and call down to her friends i hate it when they get easy near the top. I have to say i loved it getting easier near the top.

Big words are another one that often make me feel foolish when i am around conversations that i really dont understand. With heading into so many new situations and environments on this trip i have often felt foolish. The other week i poured sweet tea on my chicken and potatoes thinking it was gravy (all the time adding to the stereotype that we English really love our tea). But something i often feel foolish about is my faith. When you're around so many other people who dont believe what you do it challenges you to really think do you believe what you say and the more i think about the whole Jesus story the more it can seem to become foolish.

That God created a species to love him and follow him but they chose not to and by doing so forced him to judge them and so be unable to have a relationship with them. So to save them all 'God himself' takes on a human form and has to die, and so makes a way for the two to have a relationship with each other.

This idea seems to make little logical sense, about as much sense as rubbing a magic lamp or reading answers about life from big lumps of rock and gas floating in the sky. And yet it works, around the world billions of people have come to know this God that created them.

I was thinking how many of the greatest stories are based on this same idea of someone risking everything and even dying to make a situation right. Lord of the rings, Gladiator, the matrix, Braveheart and the fantastically cheesy Armageddon film all follow this and yet to us we want to believe that what each of these heroes is doing makes sense.

We take on the fact that some of the greatest things in life dont make sense, marriage and childbirth would probably be the most costly things in life, to give up that much freedom and agree to something that will bring you that much hardship seems like its a bit foolish and yet ultimately these are the priceless things that hold the most importance and. Planes and Ships make no sense, how can things that are that heavy fly through the sky or float on the water. Adventure sports are totally foolish and yet are totally incredible. We trust in strange foolish things all the time and maybe there not so foolish after all, these things seem to work.

So back to the faith thing.What takes more faith and is more foolish? To believe a higher being of some form, intrically greater and cleverer than us carefully designed our universe or that out of nothing by luck (even though luck/chance didn't exist then either coz there was nothing there) everything appeared.

The Bible says that God made foolish the wisdom of this world, to me anyway it makes sense to trust in something greater and more wise than me, and if people do think me a fool, i hope at least they think of me as a fool with a good heart.

Lots of people study their entire lives to prove either that God does exist or that he doesn't and they are all pretty much guaranteed to fail in this quest. Many people gain greater and greater knowledge and yet never do any good with it.

Some Christians study the Bible their entire lives trying to figure out more and more complicated answers from it and rightly so but by the end of their lives when they meet God and explain this great secret they figured out the answer to I wonder will God be pleased with them, after all he knows all the answers anyway. Or will he wonder why they couldn't just trust him to know the answers and get on with doing what he had asked and loving people.

Seems to me you save this world one random act of kindness at a time. You change this world for the better by making a difference wherever you're at. Helping those you meet along the way sounds like a bit of another foolish idea, what happened to looking after yourself. Well hey maybe bein foolish aint such a bad idea after all