“Sleep comes more easily than it returns.”
I will confess that sometimes sleep is a luxury which I cant afford. The glowing 4:00 a.m. on my phone knows all of my secrets. And while rare, last night was one such occurrence.
I sat in the back yard in the cool night air for a while. Tried reading because it’s a rare book that wins the battle against drooping eyelids. But to no avail. Then it occurred to me to log in to ECHO…our new response platform at Need Him. It integrates all means of live response (live voice, chat, text, SMS, and social media) into one system for our volunteers to use to speak to people about Jesus.
I logged in at 4:00 a.m. The que was understandably quiet but only for a moment. Then I heard the <ping> notifying me that someone was waiting to chat with me. His name was Victor. His topic was simply “religion.” I was intrigued.
His first question was simple and quite profound…”what is the point of religion?” I first attempted to separate the topic of “religion” from biblical Christianity. But he kept pressing on the topic of faith.
He asked, “but why put faith in something you cannot see or feel?”
It is a very common question. How would you answer that? I was immediately reminded of Hebrews 11:1 where it says that faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction (evidence) of things not seen.
Then this example occurred to me.
Say you are the first car at a red light. When the light turns green what do you do? You drive on through. Do you first get out to make sure the opposite light had first turned red to protect you from traffic approaching on your left and right? Probably not. But why not?
You drive on through on a green light based on faith that the other light is red. Faith is based on experience, history, observation, and reasoning. We are all people of faith. We take steps of faith every day. The greater question is “what is the foundation of that faith?”
Victor had his faith in himself and his own creation. He claimed that the world is out of control and we created God to bring reason to the chaos. He reasoned that “God is the collective creation of individual creative thought and consciousness of all mankind…we created god but we are also god.”
I told him that sounds like a very weak god. He paused and replied, “give me a moment to put that into perspective.”
Amen for little victories in conversations.
It was St. Augustine that said, “Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.”
Pray Victor sees. Pray he is given the faith to believe. Pray we all are…
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