Of faith and hope …
I’ve been meaning to write this entry for several days now but never got around to it since I’ve been too busy (in fact, I seem to be sadly neglecting this journal altogether and that is bad – I will try to rectify the situation). I should start off by saying that I believe in "each to his own" and am not trying to refute anybody else (especially since this whole entry is based on something somebody said :p) but just trying to write about how *I* feel about certain things.
In response to my last entry, Mike remarked that he’d had a good life and that he’d never prayed in his life and that prayer simply made you feel good. To me, that sounds very similar to a man who has never been sick in his life saying that medicine is just coloured water 🙂 To me prayer is about faith – faith that God exists, that he’s listening to us and that even though we might be unworthy of his attention, that he is most gracious and all merciful and will grant us what we pray for – especially if we pray for others. Of course, I also believe that prayer alone will not suffice – that if we can do something to make our prayers come true, we should do it – that God helps those who help themselves.
To me faith and hope are twin sisters and mankind needs both to get through life. I often remember the story about Pandora’s box and how after she opened the box and let all the evil loose on the world, she closed the box quickly and heard a little voice saying "let me out, let me out". She asked "Who are you?" and the voice replied "I am hope. You’ve let sickness, aging, death, plague, poverty and so many other evils loose in the world and I am the only thing that can let mankind get through it all. So let me out!" Pandora opened the box once more and let hope go free and so there was hope in the world, even through the greatest suffering, we have hope. To have faith in the face of adversity – faith in God and know that things will be OK as long as you live a good life – and to have hope for a better day is probably the main reason that I get through life day to day. Faith and hope – hope and faith …
Just an addendum posted later :p I started out wanting to basically write about the fact that faith and hope are two things intrinsic to the human condition – whether it be faith in God or faith in yourself or faith in something and we *do* always hope, whether we acknowledge it or not. But I got sidetracked talking about how *I* look at things and so it became another one of my personal meanders. Sorry about that :p
“Faith” is that one intangible that we all need to survive. Be it whatever form you wish, God, others, a dream. Without “faith”, I think man would have long ago perished from this place and his memory would have been erased by time.