For the last couple of days, I've been away, speaking at a retreat (hence, no entry yesterday).  I talked about one of my favorite subjects:  prayer and faith.  Thinking about some harrowing and long ago mountain adventures, some in which I prayed, others in which, at that time not being a believer, I did not, I noted that, ironically, whether I prayed or not, the adventures in which I was enmeshed continued, unfolding their challenges and difficulties.  Broadly speaking, either way, I experienced no visible relief.
     So what, in this case, is so great about faith?  Faith, as we know, is difficult.  Even with faith, we often see nothing.  We often do not see what we want to see, we often do not understand what we would like to understand.  Belief comforts, but it doesn’t always explain; faith soothes, but it doesn’t always resolve, at least in this life.  So does Paul say, in 2 Corinthians 5:7, that, “We walk by faith and not by sight.”
     How true this is.  Did I see anything, any visible signs of surcease or relief in the often overwhelming blackness of those mountain challenges?  No, I did not.  But I believed.  Even in darkness, I believed.  Even in the darkness, I believed that there was something more, believed that that was something else, that there was someone besides me amidst the mountain tumult erupting around me.
     But I still couldn’t see.  Was I really better off?  Yes, I was, but, oddly enough, it was only because I believed.  Because I believed, I had long ago come to understand and find thoroughly logical and sensible that I (and everyone else) live in a framework of knowing more profound than we can finitely imagine.  I knew that even though I would never be able to see everything, there nonetheless existed, in a way that is difficult for us to fathom, someone who knows and understands everything, someone who grants value and purpose to all things.  I could not see this purpose, I could not clearly know this purpose, but I knew and believed it was there; if I did not, I knew that I was looking at a world without any point at all, an accident in an accidental nothingness, an eventuality that defies all explanation.  So I prayed.  I stepped into faith.
     And I did so aware that as the apostle Paul observes at the end of the fourth chapter of 2 Corinthians, what we--every one of us--do not know now pales before what we will one day know, that the uncertainty we experience now will one day crumble and faint before the certainty of the, as Paul puts it, “weight of glory” to come.  There is something more than a random world.
     We believe now precisely because we cannot now see.