Faith and Spiders

Once I was remarking to my father that a certain college offered no campus ministry at all, and he replied that they think they’re “too smart for God.” I’ve found that this is a pretty common idea, it seems that nowadays we all want facts, we’ve got a wealth of information on the internet and we like to use it. We check Web MD to see what ails us, the weather channel to see how likely it is that it is going to rain, all this said are we “too smart” for God? No, absolutely not and actually we can be too foolish. I was foolish and still am in a way and we all are, I wanted the facts and thought I had them and replaced faith with certainty. Jesus said all we need was a mustard seed of faith and I couldn’t muster that. Instead I wanted to know, which is admirable but it won’t make me believe. I can spin off tons of facts that point to God, I can write about archeology and how the Bible is completely accurate, or physics and say how finely tuned our universe is, mathematics to point to the complexity of the world, biology to the intricate nature of the human anatomy, the list goes on and on. But it won’t replace faith and faith requires belief. I am deathly afraid of spiders, I don’t know what it is but I cannot stand to see something with eight legs spinning a web and moving around in my house. While I know that it is unlikely a spider will bite me, and depending on the species even more unlikely I will be harmed by a bite, I still am terrified. That is a case where my belief overcomes the facts. It is the same with faith, facts, equations, and graphs can change my mind but not my heart, and that is what matters. Am I saying that faith should be blind, or uneducated? No, I’m saying that the problem today isn’t that we’re “too smart” for God, we’re just too blind, afraid of stepping out of our comfort zone. Faith is tough, but we don’t need a lot which is a good thing, if I can believe in something and hold on to it despite my changing moods and fears of letting go, then that is what really matters. The only thing is that I’ll never know the truth if I don’t take the first step.