For the next few days, I share from a chapter in one of my books (Thinking About God).  It's a meditation on faith.

     "Sleep well, my sweetheart", he said to his wife, "please don't worry too much."

     No one will know how much Rob Hall believed in what he said.  Terribly weak from lack of food and sleep, he was bivouacked on the south summit of Mt. Everest, the highest mountain in the world, talking on a shortwave telephone receiver via satellite to his wife at their home in Christchurch, New Zealand.  She was eight months pregnant with their first child.
     By dawn, Mr. Hall was dead, one of eight who would die on the mountain that night.  No one expected him to go; he was one of the top Everest guides on the planet.  Incredibly strong and durable, he had climbed the peak several times before.  The storm in which he was trapped was just one more in a long series he had encountered on the mountain over the years.  He'd make it.
     Maybe that's what Mr. Hall really thought.  Maybe he really did believe that he would get through the night and be all right.  He had every reason to think so.  He had the utmost faith in his ability to deal with anything the mountain threw at him.  He trusted himself implicitly.
     His belief in himself framed his world.

     When the Roman Catholic College of Cardinals elected Albino Cardinal Luciani as the pope following the death of Pope Paul VI in August 1978, one of his colleagues, hoping to encourage him as he assumed the responsibilities of leading the largest Christian denomination in the world, whispered to him, "Be strong; God will not call you to a task that he won't help you carry out."
     In other words, Pope John Paul I, make your faith in God the underpinning of the way you go into the future.  Make it the hope, strength, and measure of your world.
    Although Rob Hall and Cardinal Luciani saw the world in different ways, they both looked at it through the eyes of their faith.  They formulated their picture of reality according to what they believed.
     As do we.  What we believe shapes and determines what we see and, consequently, what we do.  It creates our world.  For instance, if we do not believe that mountains exist, then we would regard a trek through the Himalayas as little more than a walk down a country lane.  Though our eyes would see the mountains, our mind would not.  Similarly, if we did not believe in cancer, we might as well smoke cigarettes twenty-four hours a day.  Although we may have read of the relationship of cigarette smoking to cancer, we have refused to believe it.  Our eyes have seen, but our mind has not.
     What we see and what we choose to see can be very different.  Reality is what we inherently see, and it exists whether or not we believe that it does.  Faith, however, is what we choose to see.  It is not necessarily consistent with what is real or true.  It may not conform to the way that someone else pictures the world, either.  But it is true for us.  Faith is the painting—our painting—of reality which we believe gives the most meaning to our life.  It's the world we create, and how we create it.   Faith is a way of seeing, a way of looking at the world, a way of looking at ourselves and, if we so choose, God.  It's the lens through which we look at our challenges and circumstances, the patterns of our times, the façades of existence.  With faith we look at the universe and try to understand it; we question, ponder, and decide what we think and what we do.  With faith we grapple with what we know, and wrestle with what we do not.  We discover, we encounter.  Faith is the beginning of the way we live, the basis of how we interact with our environment, the knife with which we carve the path of our lives.  Faith is how we see.
     And we shall see tomorrow that how we see is much important than what we see, for as we shall also see, we really will not "see" anything unless we believe there is something to be seen.

(From Thinking About God:  Meditations on a Considered Life, 2007, William E. Marsh)