Faith

Since I was a boy, I've believed that my life would end up a certain way. One day I would grow up and when I crossed that threshold into adulthood, there would be certain things just sitting around waiting for me - there would be a great job, a wife, a few kids, a couple of dogs (although I've never been crazy about them), a house with a white picket fence, and all the junk food I could possibly eat. For the longest time, this was more than some ethereal vision of what my life would some day be, I viewed these things with a sense of entitlement that defies comprehension. And yet part of me knew with near-perfect faith, that those things would one day be mine.
Now, had things worked out as I had envisioned, I certainly wouldn't have time to blog - what with all the kids and dogs and picket fences running around causing a ruckus. But since the only thing waiting for me when I crossed that threshold was the nearly unlimited supply of junk food, I find myself wifeless, kidless, dogless, houseless, and fenceless...with plenty of time to blog and plenty of questions about faith that need answering.
See, I always learned that faith meant believing in something you couldn't see that was true. I also learned that God loves all of his children and wants the best for them. So when you add the simplified version of faith with the idea of a loving God, you get my recipe for the ideal adult life. And the best part about it is that all you have to do to make it happen is believe (I feel a Disney song coming on)...and somehow all that belief travels to some metaphysical realm where's it's transformed into tangible reality and delivered back to you with a big red bow. Somehow I made it through quite a lot of my adolescence with this "faith is like an ez-bake oven" theory firmly entrenched in my mind. It wasn't until I grew up and didn't find my perfect life waiting that I really started to question this theory.
Now I realize that there are plenty of problems with the above theory...and I have neither the time, nor the energy to explore each of the many fallacies I happily ignored for all those years. But somewhere along the way, I started to doubt. I doubted my theory. I doubted the premises upon which I had based my theory...and ultimately I found myself in a decidedly unhappy place. I had developed a certain sense of entitlement...and like a spoiled child who doesn't get his way, I felt somehow betrayed when I wasn't given those things I felt entitled to. So there was a lot of complaining and mumuring and listening to whiny music...until I finally realized what it was I'd been missing.
This is extremely simple, but also extremely important, and disturbingly easy to forget or even miss altogether. The reason faith works, and the reason my ez-bake oven analogy didn't is that faith is a principle of action. So faith leads to miracles and all sorts of other fantastic things...and all because ordinary men and women find the courage and tenacity to step out of the realm of belief and into the realm of action.
So here's the moral of the story - the wife, the kids, the dogs, the house, the fence, the job, the candy...they're all out there...they're just waiting for you to stop waiting.