PURE FAITH
PURE FAITH
BY John Tuft
A time of waiting takes faith. When it’s our birthday or the Christmas season, we are waiting. With faith, there will be celebration, gifts, food and family and friends. Going for tests about a medical problem we are having means there will be a time of waiting. There will be results and findings and the future will be decided. Finishing the writing of a novel of a story you feel you must tell means that there will be a time of waiting. Strangers with the power to send it out into the world will read and decide, while you wait. I just happen to be in that position at the moment. Waiting is an act of faith.
A time of living is an act of faith. Just the fact that you are here now, on planet earth, reading these words, is an act of faith. You could have been one of trillions and trillions of sperm that don’t fertilize an egg. But you made it this far. So far. And you have a mind, a mind that can read these markings, a mind that can read these markings and feel something from them, learn something from them, respond to them. That’s part of living. You are in a place, descended from other humans, perhaps having made humans yourself. And you really don’t know why. But you’re here, acting by reading and thinking. A miracle of astounding proportions. Living is an act of faith.
A time of dreaming is an act of faith. Have you ever made plans? Have you ever made plans and worked to implement them and see them come to fruition? Do you have dreams that seem like plans that could never be? Those are the seedlings of faith. Do you have dreams that feel bigger than life? Dreams that seem impossible. Like writing a book. Being a humble person. A grateful person. Saying something new to the world. Finding the solution to an impossible problem. Beating drugs or alcohol. Finding that one person in the world who makes you feel special, like at long last you are home. Dreaming is an act of faith.
A time of creating is an act of faith. Have you made humans yet? It’s not all that difficult for most. It’s figuring out what to do with them that is the real act of creating. Do you go through life seeing things in a particular way. Photographers have an innate sense of what composes an arresting picture. Writers create stories, because they just have to do it. Needle and thread and different cloths and materials just tell some folks that they are garments just waiting to be created. Have the humans that you made produced their own humans yet? You had little to do with it, yet the ‘grands’ affixed to their names does wonders in your own soul somehow. Creating is an act of faith.
A time of love is an act of faith. Aye, there’s the rub, as Hamlet says it. He was referring to comparing death to sleeping, whereas I’m comparing faith and love. Every act of love is an act of faith. Faith in what, you might wonder. You tell me. Why do we love? What prompts us, what moves us, to act in another person’s best interest ahead of our own? What is happening when we encounter another person and the feeling of certainty grows within us that, yes, this is my person? The one in who I want to make my home. The love of my life. Loving is an act of faith. Pure faith.
A time of acting in faith brings joy. That’s how we know. That’s how we are sure that it is faith. Pure faith yields pure joy. As I sit here writing these words I am feeling a bit displaced. Yet I am certain that this displacement is a step on a journey, not the destination. That certainty is faith.
Words are magic and writers are wizards.
