“And if you are the sons of God, then have you been born of the spirit of God; and whosoever has been born of the spirit has in himself the power to overcome all doubt.” (The Urantia Book, The UB, 142:5.3)
The essential story of my life experience has been a voyage of faith through rough water, sometimes sheltered in its cove, or cast out on its treacherous deep. When I was a teenager, I voyaged without faith. Then I found it in my twenties, went through another phase of shipwreck, losing it, and then yet another episode of denying its validity. Plagued by faith’s evil twin, doubt, until later I rediscovered its truth for me. I have had significant others minimize the importance of faith; this affected me when I was young. But I went through that insecurity and disappointment and found faith again.
“Is the love of truth and the willingness to go wherever it leads, desirable? Then must man grow up in a world where error is present and falsehood always possible.” (The UB, 3:5.10)
My faith survived to finally have more of a life of its own, that “gift of God” Jesus spoke about, unrelated to the ups and downs that beset my existence. “Even this saving faith you have not of yourselves; it also is the gift of God.” (143:2.7)
It is unreasonable--when the philosophical test of reason withers it, it blooms through the frost; the culture of cynicism kills it, yet it lives to rise again, to provide life and hope because, ultimately, we discover there is no more reasonable model for living on this earth. From the ashes, the phoenix of faith spreads out its great feathered wings and beckons to me, and once again I climb up on its back and fly towards heaven.
I have learned from Jesus to, “enable [my] spiritual nature to begin [my] deliverance from the evils of inaction by the power-presence of living faith.” (130:6.3)
As I’ve grown towards a “whole-souled belief, an implicit faith” (156:5.12) and fallen “whole heartedly in love with truth,” (157:2.2) I’ve passed through theories whose validity I always tested. I went beyond the models for reality that I experimented with, and I left the realm of ideas to discover something more.
Faith is where ideas and theories cease for me, and I touch something that I have put my whole heart and mind into, and yet it is something beyond thinking, a living faith, not merely thoughts about faith. I was far away from this point in my earlier years. I’m much closer to it now. I found faith in my meditations, moments of personal communion with the Father. I see it emerge in activities that are not so religious, such as some of my poetry that upholds the faith of simple people, country folk, farm workers, the “simple faith of a child,” defending it from the seemingly more sophisticated urban atheists who try to deride their faith. Let us help the children of God learn, keep, and grow their faith.
