Faith is a reality and it reaches out to facts that are more solid, more real, more substantial, and more eternal than anything registered by our physical senses. --John Phillips Emotions are not faith. A lot of people will tell you, if you dont /feel/ it, then you dont believe it. Your emotions are all over the place, because somebody spent years psychologically abusing you. The mind and the soul are not separate entities. The physical and the intellectual are by necessity intertwined. Faith is not a feel-good sing along. Show me your actions, and I will show you your religion. Do not let abusers tell you your faith is not real. Do not let the tiny (but vocal) subset of uneducated, presumably well-meaning, small-minded believers tell you that your worship is not real, your faith is not genuine, if you do not experience the emotional catharsis which they demand as evidence of faith. Its not that you are not experiencing enough emotion. Just the opposite. You have experienced so much, in such a short period of time, your emotions by necessity shut down completely, as a form of self-defense. That doesnt somehow make your faith less real. I spent most of my first year coming to church late, so I would miss the music portion of the service, and I slipped out when the sermon ended, to avoid the rest of the music. I spent most of the second year, holing up in the children cry room, crying, any time I let myself test those floodgates. Three years after the fact, I still go to church late once in a while; I still hole up in the cry room once in a while. So what? Faith is DOING, faith is BELIEVING, faith is LIVING AS YOU CLAIM YOU BELIEVE. Everything else looks great on paper, but if your actions dont back up your words, your faith is empty, and hollow, and like a house built on sand, when you need bedrock beneath your feet, faith that is spoken but is not lived, will not hold you up when the storms rage, and the lightening strikes. When they harass you, when they break the restraining order, when you have to replace the broken deadbolt, when your PTSD flashbacks wake you from a sound sleep and have you racing to the toilet to vomit in the middle of the night, it is faith /lived/ in which you will find peace and safety.
Posted on: Sat, 19 Jul 2014 05:43:44 +0000
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