Everlasting Joy

What is your personal view about faith? Is it a difficult subject to talk about? To me, faith has many levels.

When you are a student, you may be living in a care-free environment. Life offers many pleasures to indulge in. You may also be the one of the 'wild' type who has 'been there, done that'. Many issues about life still look a bit hazy to you and you are not ready to live a life of devotion, at least not until you are committed to get married. After marriage, life is beautiful. There is a stable relationship and you feel satisfied with what you have. You go to church, you send your children to Sunday school and you live a moralistic kind of life. You may also indulge in other forms of pleasures but find that you are actually missing out on something. You may also turn to a socratic kind of wisdom about life. Questioning life. Questioning faith.

If you are stuck in any of these stages in life, you have to move on. Otherwise life will become stale, rusty and full of strife and agony.

If you say you belong to a certain faith, here's something I personally don't agree. Faith is not something that you register into and have it printed out. It is not about infants lining up to be baptised. It is not about compulsary attendance of Sunday service. It is not about listening to professors talk theology to you. These are too easy. You are living in your own comfort zone. To me, faith has to be a little more difficult to grasp - to be authentic.

Faith is about direct communication with God, no mediator needed. It is presenting yourself as a person before Him, all your imperfections, sins, suffering, everything. Faith is something subjective (there is no absolute certainty in life) but it involves a pro-active effort on your part to seek the Truth. It is giving everything back to God. It is losing your life, so that you can find it back. It is like immersing yourself as if you are part of the Great Story. That is the power of faith.

Before I end, here is a wager for the modern skeptics. Nobody can scientifically prove the existence of God. As I have said in my earlier posting, God is perceived only through the mind, not the senses. My wager is, if there is no God, then you don't gain anything at all. On the other hand, if there is a God, well, here, you lose nothing but you gain everything in life and have everlasting joy. Think about it, my friend.