There's this something I've been pondering for the entire week, and, this morning, I'm watching the sun rise behind these abnormally amazing clouds, and the wind pushing the trees in an awkward rhythm, and everything seems strange and beautiful...and it hits me: the answer to the thing I've been pondering. At least, an answer that is good enough for me.
You see, last weekend, I only had one student in my teen Sunday School class. This isn't all that uncommon; two of the kids are avid swimmers for their swim team, one has a part-time job that sometimes needs her on Sundays, and the others are only there sometimes, anyway. At first, I thought, this might be awkward. This is a sixteen-year-old boy, stuck in a room with me and the latest issue of DevoZine, the devotional we study each week. It is beyond likely that he is regretting every move that led him up to this room, this morning, including his mother telling him to "get up and go to Sunday School."
However, I'm sure he doesn't know that the material we discussed in that room was food for thought for an entire week for me. The initial discussion was about confidence, and the fact that so many young people dislike their images. This teen appears particularly confident, and when I told him that, he agreed. "But," he said, "it's still just as bad for guys as it is for girls. Guys care about their appearance at least as much as girls, in high school, anyway." I did not know this. I thought the early morning struggle we have in this house, me vs. the five-year-old, when I am challenged as "the meanest mom" who makes him wear "the ugliest clothes" was...a phase. Somehow, however, the topic swirled away from confidence issues, and on to something deeper. We transitioned into the topic of God's existence, period. It's such a vast concept to wrap your mind around anyway, and as a teen, it's often the furthest thing from your thoughts. I remember those days. I remember thinking, "I'll have time later to worry about that stuff. To say sorry for the bad stuff I'm doing, and to care about what God says." Thankfully, I was right...I do have time, now. But it doesn't mean I was right to think that way.
"It's just so weird," he said, "there are, like, a thousand different concepts on what happens after we die...and like, are there ghosts or not, and is there a purgatory, or do we go straight to heaven? Or are there just ghosts because those people decided to stick around?" Ohhh...what did I sign up for? This is hard enough to try to explain to a five-year-old who thinks God should wear a bell on his "collar" because that would at least help him know when He's in the room.
"And," I say, "there's the ashes to ashes, dust to dust theory. When we die, we are buried, or cremated, and it's likened to a deep sleep, or a different realm of consciousness, until we are all resurrected."
"Yeah, and that's crazy. I mean, it's insane if you think about it. Not that I don't love sleeping...but...we'd be resurrected, right alongside Abe Lincoln or something. How weird would that be?"
I nodded. I hadn't thought of that.
"I mean, how do you know?" he asked. "How does anyone know?"
That's the thing. None of us know. Nobody, to my knowledge, has died and come back to write the tutorial on what to do when you see the light. Or don't see the light. Maybe there is no light.
We all have our own beliefs, and part of the reason the world is as messed up as it is, is because we can't seem to agree to disagree. We can't seem to fathom that there might be more than one right answer. After all, to this day, and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, God hasn't shown up on a Sunday morning dressed in his best Armani and said "Hey, way to go, guys, turns out YOU are the right religion. All those other folks worshipping this morning, (or last night, or Wednesday at sundown, or whatever), are craaaaaazy!"
So, anyway. This morning seems weird to me. The weather seems to indicate a change is coming. Which, duh, it is. It'll be snowing before we know it. But it's just one of those odd, "winds of change" mornings, when it seems that beyond the clouds, in the rush of the breeze, in the peeks of sunlight through strangely golden-green puffs of white, there is a mystery.
Mystery.
The mystery, it came to me, is faith. And faith is largely based on trust. I realized that all those times, as a teen, when I was acting not-so-appropriately, I trusted that everything would be okay. I had this inner glimmer of hope that even if I wasn't the shiny penny that my mother expected me to be, I'd still come out alright. Which, I think, I did...I trusted, even when I didn't know, that God would make sure of it. I had faith. Although, I wouldn't have admitted it at the time.
Even from birth, we've been programmed to trust. At the moment we are born, all things we "knew" from conception to that point, are ripped away, and we are forced to trust, and rely on someone else to get us through. We have faith, if you can imagine a tiny being having faith, because we don't know anything else. As life continues, we learn the bitter reality that often, relying on someone doesn't always pan out. Trust is abandoned, faith can become a resentment, a disappointment. Let's face it, reality can be a major letdown from time to time. People get sick, people get injured, people we love are plucked from our lives in the blink of an eye. Living in a world of ever-increasing melancholy is no picnic. So what happens? We give up, that's what. We acknowledge faith as something warm and fuzzy, something we can claim when things are going great, but ignore when things are, well, crappy.
I realized that it's okay to admit that I don't know the answers to some of the topics we discussed on Sunday. Encouraging my class to have faith, however, even when there seems to be no person they can trust, is something I intend to work on. Faith is about accepting the mystery. It's about believing when it looks like there is nothing worthwhile. The way I see it, faith is the mystery in our own life story: it keeps us turning the pages to see if something greater will happen in the next chapter.
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