Love and Faith

It's funny- all I seem to want to do is write lately. Literally: this track of thought is keeping me from going to bed. May as well get it down for others to give their opinion on.

I had been thinking for a bit about how people handle their faith. We all know the type of believer where they can rattle off any verse of the Bible and can completely quote whole paragraphs, so on and so forth.  But really... isn't that only, like, 10% of it? Don't get me wrong, I still plan on reading the Bible and studying what it has to teach me. But how important is that part? Hear me out for a second, here:

Example. There have been many, many, studies done on love. There are a million definitions that people can give on what love really means, or what it is to be in love. Can you see love? No. You can see people acting out of love, but love itself is not visible. One can study all they want about what someone feels when they are in love. What hormones and neurotransmitters are released when people feel things associated with love. But all the studying in the world doesn't compare to actually feeling love for someone else. You can't understand it until you go ahead and feel it. Simply put, nothing compares. There is no fully accurate way to describe what someone feels when they first realize that they completely adore every little thing about someone else and that there is no other person on this planet that they would rather spend their time thinking about. There is no perfect way to sum up what it feels like to know that you could spend the rest of your life with one single person and never look back. Which is why people search so desperately for it- it's such an amazing thing.

Relate all this back to Faith. People have tried to scientifically pinpoint how humans handle Faith. They have tried labeling certain parts of the brain that help humans process what they call to be a belief in a higher deity. People read the Bible in order to learn what Jesus wanted us to know and memorize it so that they can defend their beliefs and not forget anything they would need to know from it that could be valuable. While the Bible is a great tool in following Jesus, I don't believe it should be the only resource. I don't think we can fully understand anything the Bible is telling us until we go ahead and do it. We can tell each other that we need to love one another but you can't actually know what that means until you do it. This includes loving the people that you can't stand. We all have those people- the ones you swear God put on this earth just to test you. Guess what? He probably is. How many of us would pass this test?

I guess in order to sum up what I am trying to get at is that while I appreciate when I talk to someone about my faith and they are able to bring up specific quotes and passages, I find so much more value in hearing testimonies about how people put their faith to work. Anyone could read and be knowledgeable about the Bible. It takes a real Christian in order to act it out and say "I know about love, because I love people every single day."

And in that same way, it is impossible to understand love until you wholeheartedly love someone else.

Even after the experience, Faith and love can remain a mystery... but at least this way, you can take pride in knowing you dove into the experience, instead of letting it pass you by.

~Bridget Nicole