A very important topic in the life of young people involves developing a life of faith. Young people, like yourselves have a lot of questions about life. Why are things the way they are? What does life have in store for me? How can I succeed in life? How do I navigate through life with the minimal amount of pain? These are all very valid questions and they require a convincing answer. Young people do not suffer fools gladly.
The best analogy I can give for faith involves the imagery of trying to cross a raging river or a deep valley between two mountains by walking over a narrow wooden bridge. Is the bridge strong enough? What material is it made of? If wood, is the wood rotten or is it new? Did the bridge builder do a good job in its construction? What about the anchors on either side are they secure? How is the weather today? Is it too windy to cross? Life is like that there are so many decisions to be made when facing challenges in our lives be they big or small. Faith involves putting your trust in the involvement of someone else in the course of your life. When you step into an airplane and the door is closed, you have put your trust in the ability and competence of the pilots flying the plane. You have also invested faith in the people who built the plane and the ones who maintain it. Whether you get to your destination or not is now completely out of your control. You can only have faith that you will get to your destination safely.
Many people struggle with putting their faith in an abstract being called God. You can’t see Him so how do you know He exists? If He is all powerful and all knowing why would He even be wasting time worrying about whether I make it safely through life or not? Isn’t the universe a billion billon times bigger than me anyway? Why would He even care? The beauty of the ‘bigness’ of God is that he has the capability to care about whether the sun burning hydrogen at the right amount and is shining properly or whether the smallest blood cell in your body is performing the way it should as well. He can also monitor, track and adjust an infinte number of other variables happening in the universe at the same time. He is the ultimate supercomputer.
While in College I studied something called computational fluid dynamics. Essentially what it is is science trying to model everyday behaviour and assign an equation to it. My university was researching the way in which paint, in microscopic droplet form, adhered to a rolling film. What the researchers did was to try to pin point the location of each drop of paint from one micro second to the next, plot a trajectory and then generate an equation that explained its motion. Needless to say the equation produced took up a few pages of lined paper. Imagine doing that for a couple billion droplets of paint for a few seconds. My computer would crash a thousand times.
As we navigate life we are like drops of paint, we have a beginning and an end and in the middle there is an equation of sorts that plots our trajectory. The person we call God knows our every step, He knows every possible choice we can make in our lives and their associated outcome. He has a plan for our existence and He will make sure that the bridges in our lives that we sometimes have to cross are strong enough to carry us. We have choices to make in our lives, we have the power to make them, but really we are all sitting on an airplane, the door is closed and we have to have faith in the captain. God will never stop us from making our own decisions, he is not a tyrant. He will however sometimes whisper suggestions to us to help us navigate life more smoothly. Faith really is a vulnerability. You have to choose to believe.