When I was
walking up and back surveying all those religious books in the Greenville
library as a 20-year-old, I had lost faith in Christianity. I’d tried to
believe in what many well-meaning people had tried to pass down, but it just
didn’t connect.
Looking back
now, it seems to me that faith had been misrepresented. It had been presented
as a noun. Stuff to believe.
Faith is its own worst enemy when it’s
presented as a noun.
It’s ironic,
makes me laugh now to realize, that right there in the library, by being
confused and miserable and desperately curious all at the same time I had already
crossed over into the realm of faith as a verb.
Much later
there would come a time when I laughed out loud about it reading what Jesus,
that Jewish guy I’d quit believing in, had said.
Ask and you
get. Seek and you find. Knock and a door opens.
These are real faith words. They’re active, effective.
Ask.
Seek.
Knock.
Help is a faith
verb too. Unless we misunderstand, confusing it with a passive process.
Follow is the
central faith-word in Christianity. But I was still a long way from following.
