The Faith of a Child v. the Doubt of the Adult

We seem destined to be tormented by cravings that we cannot satisfy or to live dissatisfied lives dead to our deepest longings.

We tend to think of childhood as that period in our lives when we are preparing for life.  But the truth of the matter is that life for the most part comes right at us from the very beginning.  No warm-ups; no pre-game; no do-overs or mulligans.  It's the real thing from our first breaths.

Sadly, I don't really remember much from my birthday ... the best I can do is pick up the trail of memories beginning several years afterward.  It is humbling to realize that my earliest memories are not really independent thoughts but more what I've been told about the first few years of my life with memories filled in from pictures, stories in my baby book or home videos.  All of us are shaped by people and events that we may not even vaguely remember.  I have just a handful of memories of my biological mother who committed suicide just before my tenth birthday.  Yet whether I care to admit it or not, she still affects me decades later.  So I know that my earliest thoughts were not shaped in a vacuum, but I also know that they did not simply come from the outside.

When I was only a small child, I believed in God, in love, and in laughter.  To believe in these things is natural to the human spirit.  For a child, more is unknown than is known.  To believe in God, in mystery, in the unseen, is not difficult for a child.  Children are pretty much born to believe.  They are the perfect candidates for myths, fables and fairy tales.  Adults, on the other hand, see this as a weakness, as proof of the naivete of childhood.

As we grow older, we come to know better.  I find it odd how as adults, we struggle with faith.  We need evidence to justify our belief in the invisible.  We attempt to build faith systems constructed with our logic and reason.  As children, we just believed.  Faith was so natural.  Yes, our innocence left us vulnerable to believing things that were not true, but is it also possible that this same innocence exists so that we may find that which is most true?  We seem to be created with an inherent inclination to believe.  So perhaps the truth is that we don't grow into faith; we grow out of it.

We have within us both the ability and the disposition to look beyond the material world and to search for the eternal.  If God exists and we were created to know him and faith is the means by which that happens, doesn't it make sense that we would be born with such an inclination?  For others, to believe in God is far too great a stretch.  They even consider such to be an insult to their intelligence.  For them believing in something they cannot empirically see or test is absurd.  And if we were to speak of the effects of God on the lives of his people, they will insist that secondary evidence is not enough.  If it is not primary then it is unreal.

Then there  is love.

... To be continued ...