If you have been watching the Winter Olympics, you may have observed that perhaps the worst place to finish is fourth.  Those who finish fourth miss out on a medal, but unlike those who finish well below them, they barely miss it.  After four or more years of day in and day out of training, they fail, often by a few hundredths of a second, to make the mark.  They've come so close, yet may as well be miles away.  Hours and hours of training have come down to a sliver, even a speck of time.  But what an enormous speck!
     Very few of us will ever be on the Olympic stage.  Just to make the Olympic team is an achievement in itself, one only a handful of people will ever realize.  Yet to train for days and days for years and years only to finish, by less than a instant of time, out of the medals can be, I would think, bitterly disappointing.
     As I have reflected on this, I have seen an analogy with faith.  For those who, like Pascal suggested, put all of their being into believing in an unseen God, and then find themselves deluded, that this God in fact doesn't exist, have not lost nearly as much as those who never bothered to believe and only later learned that he in fact does exist, that he is the undisputed lord of the creation.  Better to put all of one's hopes into a medal and not get it than to never try, if one is fully capable of doing so, at all.  We never know what we miss if we do not try, yet we can only try if we believe there's a reason to do so.
     Faith is indeed a complicated thing.