Around this time a couple of years ago, I wrote, using an excerpt from my book Imagining Eternity, about the moment in which I decided that Jesus Christ was undeniably divine, real, and objectively and subjectively true.  This week marks forty years since that moment in the mountains outside of the tiny town of Jasper, Alberta, in the heart of the Canadian Rockies.  Forty years, forty remarkable years that I find difficult to fathom or measure; forty arduous years as well, forty years of believing in and grappling with a person whose fullness I cannot in this life exhaustively assess; forty years of following and listening to a divine being who has never made himself visibly known to me; forty years of living with a single focus, to know and proclaim Jesus Christ, of living this life while believing in one beyond it, one I cannot now see, yet one that I believe frames and explains this present experience.  A life of faith.
     So why believe?  Why live a life that, as the apostle Paul puts it, is one of faith and not one of sight?  Why be a rational being who is living a life devoted to the non-rational (but not irrational)?  Oddly, I live this life because I see that faith, believe it or not (no pun intended!), is, in light of everything that this life comprises, the most rational thing I can do.  Given the fact of my personhood; the fact of my mind and consciousness; the fact of the universes's incredibly complexity and order; the innate longing of every human being for meaning in a supposedly meaningless universe; the presence of love in a reputedly cold and dark cosmos; the fact of the moral sense and the truth of right and wrong; the historicity, veracity, and reliability of the Bible; and the millions and millions of people, including me, who have completely changed, in a positive way, their outlooks on themselves and existence in response to what they perceived to be a divine inbreaking or call; I see no other way to understand, rationally, the undeniable facts of life, beingness, purpose, and presence.
     I believe, by faith, because I cannot believe that, by faith, scientific or otherwise, I can come to believe, rationally, that you and I, and the entire world as well, are all, to borrow some words from Carl Sagan in his best selling Cosmos, that is and all that ever will be.
     And the journey continues.