Believing.... yea u heard rite! Believing in God

If you are trying hard to believe in God while a hundred voices are telling you to stop believing, you are my kind of person.  Believing doesn’t come easy to me either. It never has come easy: I suppose it never will. I almost always believe in God in spite of problems and pains that tell me things are so wrong that believing in a good God doesn’t make any sense. The things I say here are filtered through many years of believing against the grain.

Too many people I truly care about hurt too much to let believing come easy. My prayers do not take away the pain or hold back the tolling of the bells. My friend’s marriages (including mine,once upon a time) turn into battlefields and their children go through a hundred kinds of mini hells. In the midst of it all I wonder, God does not do any – let alone many miracles for my crowd.

But the pains of people in my little orbit are just starters. Those starving children that I pray for across the seven seas keep on dying : and the oppressed people I pray for keep getting their heads banged continuously with no redemption in site. I am not whining or whimpering. I know we make most of our miseries. But off late I have had this strong feeling to admit that I believe in God. It must be God himself, or so I’d like to think ;) I have never been an atheist so to speak but I have never thought that the God of everything had to be believed in the way He should be. When you are a just another face in the crowd, whose travelled the lengths and breadths of four continents (excepting Australia)  and has seen more than ones fair share of all the not-so-nice-things and after having experienced most of them first hand,  it’s only natural to not believe in God.

I believe that God really cares, even thou I feel a lot of hurts and pain that tell me he does not seem to care. This does not mean that I am filled with “Faith” from the top of my head to the tips of my toes and that I am waiting to break loose and scream with a YAYYYYY , Hail Jesus !!!  but on the contrary its that belief that sneaks into my soul while my mind is saying, “ My God, where were you when I need you?’ that I’m talking about… Now you get it, eh? I believe in God, hey! not really but kinda….actually I believe in this but not so much in that part ….. wait a minute…. now do I believe or not? Am I supposed to believe or maybe I should just pretend that I do, just in case he cancels all those good things that he  just MAY have in store for me somewhere in the future that I don’t see jus yet.  Until one day I decided to consciously write down all those moments when I believed in God, eagerly anticipating a miracle…like they say hoping against all hopes. I’m talking about the real believing, the kind that you do with your deepest self, down where your primeval feelings flow. The thinking part is not hard. I can think of arguments that I so desperately want to have with God even in my sleep. It is that feeling part that comes hard, the part that lets you know in the deepest places of your soul that it is all right even when your head tell you everything is ghastly.

Deep feeling fiercer than mere emotion, is what I have in mind. I am talking about feeling  that grab you at the core of your being and tell you whether life is good or rotten. These are the feelings that push your life toward joy or misery. We are talking about feelings of the heart, the window of your being where you are open to God.

When I feel that I am loved when everything about me says I am unlovable, then I am believing, really believing.

 I love it when Pastor Shawn says, “ Welcome to Word of life, the place where misfits worship, we are all misfits here” I suddenly start to believe that God in all His perfection loves an imperfect me….a childlike belief which is overwhelming at times takes over.

When I feel that life in this valley of death is much worth the living, then Im believing …

When I feel gratitude enough to make me glad, then I am believing….

When I feel that all is right with me even when everything around me is the pits, then I am actually believing…

There are many feelings that take hold of us in many levels of our living.

 In this part of my blog I invite you to look around on a dozen different levels of your life to see whether you have discovered a sense of all rightness there in your own feelings…I’m going to be writing on different stories, you may call ‘em chapters,  I like to call it my story of discovery, a disclosure that it can be all right when things are brutally bad.  Good old Amazing Grace, it is still the bottom line of discovery.