Faith.

People say it’s simple.

Maybe.

But it’s also one of the hardest things.

Looking at varying religions, to have faith in the One seems like a simple request. But it is the hardest of simple requests.

Personally, I find faith murky and complicated, like stumbling through the dark.

I think a lot of people say they have faith, but in reality, they turned on the lights, took notes, and have strutted through life with the last revelation they had. “The door is here. The table is here. There’s a crack in the floor there.” But then they’re confused when they stumble over something that doesn’t fit the image they had when the lights turned on. A lamp fell, and now they tripped over the unknown. They stumble and become frustrated, trying to remember what they saw when the lights were on. They remember the lamp on the nightstand and reason that that was what they tripped over. Something must have shifted, and it fell.

But that’s just it. Their trust is actually in reason, in their memory of how the room was and how it always will be. They look at a photograph of the pitch-black room they find themselves in, studying over holy pixels. But then the furniture is rearranged, and they’re so confused as to why the room they find themselves in isn’t like the photo.

They pause. They breathe. They construct a new view of the room. They try to make sense of the unknown.

Is this faith?

I, myself, have found myself reeling and confused at times due to the re-arrangements of life. I go to sit down on what I thought was a couch, but instead, I fall through time and space, collapsing on the floor.

I pause. I collect myself. I try to make sense of my world, looking for reasons and why’s to the darkness I find myself in.

Personally, I think I’m done reasoning. I’m exhausted from trying to make sense of things, to rest in the fact that a + b always = c. It doesn’t always equal c. Sometimes you pray as hard as you know how, and the miracle doesn’t come. Sometimes you obey every letter and stroke of that holy pen, but still feel completely dead inside. Sometimes you step away from all that you trusted, to find that you want to trust it all again, just to find semblance of the dark room of life you find yourself in. To then take a leap of faith and find yourself frustrated still.

Faith is a peculiar and non-formulaic thing. It is evasive and transformative. It’s an elusive shape-shifter that has some sense of substance, but insubstantial shape. Like sand in our hands, it materializes and then sifts through our fingers.

But this is what I have found, the people who possess the paramount of peace, the humans who hold the most honest sense of self, are not the ones who have the floorplan, but those who hold a hand of the one who sees “darkness as light” and nothing can escape His vision.

He will never leave me.

He will never forsake me.

And though I stumble through the dark, I have but to simply try and close my hand to feel His strong callouses.

He will see me through, and His grip will not relent.