The Hard Facts About God: Understanding What We Believe

Hello my sisters and brothers! Thanks be to God for a wonderful trip to Haiti. I have more to say than words can express and have struggled to write a cohesive story. Hopefully by tomorrow clarity will come. I have a feeling you'll be hearing about Haiti and its people for a while to come. 

Thanks for your wonderful comments and prayers while I was away. And thanks for your support of Dan's takeover of the blog. He's a far better writer than I and I, for one, was thrilled to read his writings. Although he got bit by the stats monster and swears his life can't handle the stress of a blog!

As a saving grace for my lack of writing, I have a devotional running over at Exemplify Online.Here's an excerpt. I hope you click over to read it in its entirety. 

The Hard Facts About God...


“Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” (John 20:29)

“Mom, did ya know no one’s ever seen a black hole?”

“Really? I had no idea,” I said.

My son is learning about space at school. He comes home excitedly talking about never-ending black holes and nebulas shaped like butterflies and gases that travel 4,000 feet per second. His enthusiasm is contagious and I find myself pondering the wonders and vastness of space with him.

He is, and always has been, an asker of “why?” and “how come?” But when he asks me the hows and whys of the heavens, my non-Nova watching, Stephen Hawking-reading self weakly replies, “Go ask your father.” The quest for the understanding of space, and the search for its beginnings and endings makes my head hurt. It’s too big.

My son’s also of an age where he’s looking into the expanse of the Godly realms, measuring his Sunday School education against his sixth grade learning. In the process science and religion, faith and intellect are colliding. He’s at a crossroads. I can see in his head it’s not adding up—heaven, hell, creation, eternal life.

He’s thirsty for answers. For the hard facts about God.

Recently we drove in the car and he talked again about some amazing space thing he’d just learned about. I sensed an opening and said, “Think about how big space is. The smartest scientists in the entire world can’t know a fraction of what they want to know. Space is just too vast. Now imagine if God created all of space how big He must be. We can try to understand God, but it’s just not possible for our minds to comprehend all of Him. But, just like we know things in space are real, but can't completely explain them, God is real even though we can't completely understand Him.” I said.

We talked about heaven and hell. And dying and Jesus. And faith. I saw a small light go on in his mind.
“Wow!” he said with new-found understanding, “Talking about heaven makes me want to die.”
“I know. But I want you stick around here for a while,” I chuckled.

God created us with intelligence, personalities and passions. Some folks trust and never waver in their faith about God. They’re comfortable where they are. Others wrestle with their intellect and set out in search of big answers and hard facts. I belonged to the latter category and I see my son does as well. It’s how we were made.

The struggle and the searching can be a wonderfully restorative process. God promises, “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.” (Jeremiah 29:13) God wants us to seek Him, to find Him and to know Him. If our questions lead us to Him, I believe He wants us to ask and wrestle and contemplate. But intellectualism can batter faith. The enemy lurks ever-ready to turn our seeking into the dark realms of doubt and cynicism—into a black hole. Residing in such a place leads to a creeping bitterness that can deaden and even destroy the spirit.

We can have confidence that our faith need not be blind or based on whims of fancy. It can be explored, defended and withstand an intellectual test. However faith, as science, cannot be completely explained. No matter how many questions we ask or doubts we have satisfied, we will never fully know and understand God. He’s just too big. There comes a point where we must make a choice—believe. Or not.

When we choose to take a step (not a leap) into faith we find the most amazing thing occurs—we don’t understand to believe…we believe and then we understand.