Captain Obvious

I am often amazed by how obtuse I can be, geometry pun aside. I feel like a little voice should have been shouting at me to just shut up for the past month, maybe, but you know me. I'm a talker.

So I miss things and I latch onto the wrong things and I get confused pretty easily. I pretty much blew off Amber-Drew's talk on Senior Sunday (Sorry AD!) because how many times have I heard that you don't get anywhere without taking a risk? I mean, they must tell you that in like middle school or something so you get it in your brain that living in the box only gets you so far. To steal a quote from the end of an Orlando Bloom movie that occupied my television before My Best Friend's Wedding: "No true fiasco ever began as a quest for mere adequacy. A motto of the British Special Air Force is: 'Those who risk, win.'" Geeze, I mean, isn't this the inspiration for a thousand bad senior quotes in year books? Don't the cautious always get there in the end? It's like the tortoise and the hare- which we had to explain to our French teacher- the risk just isn't worth it.

See, but the thing is (and hence the title of the post) faith is a risk. I got so caught up in wanting reasons and proof and not wanting to look stupid because I believed in something that made no sense and had no proof. I had googled someone's quote on Facebook and gotten this link to a philosophy major's reasoning as to why he was no longer a Christian. The scary thing was, he had a lot of the same questions I had. He explained away God and 'religious experiences' as something that was just in his head- someone had spoken about what it felt like to be near God and he felt the same way. Everyone's favorite- religion as social conditioning. I know people who would love this guy's paper because it would confirm their idea of organized religion as inherently flawed. I guess I'm inherently flawed because I think the church is worth saving.

House, this time instead of saving me with his caustic sarcasm, confirmed this philosophy kid. I think someone had come in with a stroke thing in her brain that caused a lack of free will and he made some Thomas Aquinas crack but then he was talking about the cause and he said, 'How do you know about the wind? You look for its effects.' Well, sometimes, I look at the church and I'm not sure that I can see the effects of Christ. I mean, people can be good people without being Godly people and people can sit in a pew every Sunday and still have so much wrong. I know this is the general argument, the first reason why most people reject the church. That wasn't the end of the philosophy kid's argument (it was sooooo long, if you need something to help you deal with insomnia, I'll find it again and send it to you. No really, it was interesting. I just needed inappropriate comic relief in my life again), but it's the whole salt of the earth thing, which I totally NEVER got before Godspell. 'But if that salt has lost its flavor, it ain't got much in its favor. You can't have that fault and be salt of the earth.' Yes, the church is full of sinners (it's a hospital) but that doesn't mean we're allowed to stay that way. We're the salt of the earth, the hands and feet of Christ. We are a people set apart, or we should be. And not because we're super special and better than anyone else but because we're claiming something else and we're representing Someone else. It's like being proud of your school except much much bigger.

So that's why we've got to be better. To show some kindness to the world, so they see the effects, so the doubters know and they can watch our actions and see the wind. A thousand million words (all of which have been heard before) will not make us any more than the mostly ineffective people we've been. OK, I have no right to say that because my amount of good contributed to the word is invisible under anything except a electron microscope, but we need to be more. We have to aspire to something better, believe in Something bigger. Can we all, please, for once, regardless of dumb creed differences, shine some light into this world? Think of how much we can do. And I'm not the first to ask and I hope I'm not the last and I know that one voice doesn't change a thing. But voices are louder together and I'm not the first.

But back to my point (sorry for the soap box). I've been so superbly worried about being justified to the world in my faith that I forgot that we're not supposed to be justified to the world. Listen, one man came to change the world, to fulfill the law and to make us right underneath it. I'm willing to take the risk with Him. Who cares if I'm wrong? It will have been the best mistake of my life, someone worth being wrong for. And, funny story, once I've jumped off the cliff, I've been caught and I don't think I'm wrong anymore.