Why?

To finish off the year, I want to do something different. This week I simply reflect on why I believe in God. It’s probably something I should have done long ago, so you know where I come from in writing this blog. My faith isn’t a tradition passed down that I cling to for safety or comfort, it’s a dynamic and often troublesome fight to understand myself, the world, and what it all means. This isn’t a long story of my life, telling of how I grew up and so on, but a reflection on what convicts me about God today.

The thing that has the most impact on me is the nature of existence itself. When I spend a night looking up at the stars, musing at the existence of the universe in all its magnitude, and considering things like where it all came from, where it ends, how there can be nothingness beyond it, I can’t help but consider what must be behind it all. How else could everything work without some form of higher power? Concepts of infinity and endlessness are quite simply beyond understanding. It’s the same with the world around me – a creation full of such intricacies that there is no way I can believe they all just happened by chance, no matter how long the earth is meant to have existed. This isn’t discarding science, but saying that there’s more to it than mere chance. Naturally my words don’t do this justice, but you need only consider something like the human body or a fragile ecosystem to see how finely balanced and carefully interrelated everything is to see my point.

The idea of the supernatural is something that convicts me quite a bit too. Much as I’ll often try to argue away seeming miracles and the like, I can’t deny that there are myriad things in this universe that at least appear supernatural in nature, whether they’re coincidences way too huge to be believable, healings, hearing the voice of God or spirits, or events that are simply not possible. Like anyone, I will often try to ignore these, I think we all want to pretend that miracles or the supernatural don’t occur, even as Christians, but the more I see or hear (from authoritative sources) the less I can deny that there’s more to this universe than what can be explained without God.

The Bible is another pretty significant impact for me. Not just believing what it says, but in studying it as a history student I come to see that it is so much more reliable than just being an object of faith. I’ll be looking at some of this more another time in this blog, but the way it all holds together, the way prophesies play out, and the way theology holds true has me thoroughly convinced that it is reliable as a historical source as well as a religious document. Even in taking an objective stance, it still makes way too much sense for me to attribute to chance, despite the questions and troubles that arise at the same time. The Bible is one of the most confusing and disputed works known to man, but for all its seeming problems it has an awful lot that holds together and speaks to me of an authentic God.

And finally my own spiritual journey is pretty special to me. From encounters with God (in whatever sense), to the times I feel without God, to seeing the way God has shaped my life and everything in it, I know that God is with me. This is an area that can’t be explained verbally, and is something that can only be experienced, but it is a core part of why I follow God.

In the end, I don’t claim to be able to prove anything to you about the truth of Christianity. It’s not my goal, and it’s a personal decision we all need to look into ourselves. Here I have only just touched on some of the major things that amaze and convict me about this world. I simply look around me and there’s no way I can’t believe in some form of higher power, and the more I look into it, the more Christianity makes sense. Our understanding of God may not be perfect, and it has questions of its own, but for me a world without God has far more questions than a world with God. That’s why I believe in God, and that’s why I struggle through the questions in this blog, to try with honesty and integrity to understand the faith that shapes who I am and what I do. What I’ve written here is why I believe, and everything else I struggle through in this blog is trying to figure out how the rest of it fits together, testing my faith and leaving nothing untouched. If it’s what I believe in, it’s not good enough just to trust that it works, I have to figure it out for myself.