Do We Believe In God?

"If there is God and if there is a future life, then there is truth, there is virtue; and man's highest happiness consists in striving to attain them. We must live, we must love, we must believe," said Pierre, "that we do not live only today on this scrap of earth, but have lived and will live eternally there, in the all" (he pointed to the sky).

— War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy

As facile as this sounds, we must ask ourselves this at every single moment of our lives: in the moments we feel the most independant, the most happy, the most fortunate, and in the moments we feel the most abandoned, the most unhappy and most entrenched in seemingly unjustifable suffering.

For there is no middle ground in terms of beliveing in God, we can't partially believe in Him and hence accept certain facts about Him and then ignore the rest. Believing in God is something that, as soon as the decision is made, and made well, will dominate every single aspect of one's life. If one believes in God, he will never become indifferent towards Him, no matter the circumstance. Believing in God results in an absolute trust in His plans for you, for to have faith in Him means that you trust that everything has absolute dependance and purpose through Him.

But even with this, there is something missing and we have not yet reached the Christian definition of God, and surprisingly it actually makes the question much more challenging to consider. No monothestic religion offers the reality that Christianity does, nothing is more groundbreaking and uplifting than the tearful eyes of the Christian when he looks upon God!

It is that God is Love, such intense Love that no human being can come to grasp how great and ineffable it really is! And yet this Love is so humble as well!

This is such a joyous burden, but also it is something so hard to really accept totally, because with this sudden insight as to our reality, one can know infinitely well whether he has embraced God - and this is based on how much Love he has for others, how much he has come to let the boundless power of God's Love fill his heart!

So the question as a Christian is so much more complicated, and so much more real. One does not simply believe in God without embracing Him from within.

The question now that we must ask ourselves is:

To what extent have I let God's Love permeate my life?

And it is so easy to fall into despair, even though we are staring at the blinding light of truth!

In those moments when I am alone, how do I know for sure that God is looking at me? That he is looking at me with His Love and compassion? Why can I not catch a glimpse of just a fraction of how much God Loves me? And when I think about Christ on the cross, I am drawn to tears realising how humble our God is! But how do I know for sure that Christ is real?

How liberating and how much of God's Love I would feel if I truly believed in Jesus Christ! How simple everything would become and how infinitely meaningful the most simple things I do each day would then become for me! How much joy would I feel contemplating eternal life with God! How questions concerning eternal damnation, eternal punishment would become utterly meaningless for me, for I would have experienced what God feels for His flock, how much Love He has for every single sheep in His flock, every single one!

But there are also moments, particularly those in which we are feeling dull and lazy, when this talk of God and Jesus Christ feels way too lofty and almost comically impossible as a thought! Simply forgetting about it and carrying on in ordinary life seems like such a tempting option. These moments I know I will look back upon with absolute horror once I have realised just how important it is to keep Christ unwaveringly fixed at the epicentre of our lives. But that these moments come at all really indicates how little I undertand about God's Love, and therefore how little of His Love I have embraced in myself.

If we love God, we will depend on him at every moment, and we will see Him as the most important thing in our lives, the Master of all.