Suppose you come awake as from a long sleep. As you wake up, you begin to recall the circumstances of your "sleep". You begin to remember that you had been injured in some way, such that you volunteered to take part in a radical experiment, though the details yet escape you.
As you regain consciousness you remember your youth, a career, fears, successes. You begin to recall lost loved ones. You thank God that you will see another day.
As you drift towards full wakefulness you remember pain, and though you seem to feel some pain now, it is distant, not the immediate force of your memory.
Now you begin to recall the details of the experiment that has kept you alive. Your body was crushed, and infection was destroying what little was left. The experiment offered a chance to survive, but the details remain fuzzy. You do know it was a controversial decision.
Now you begin to become aware of your surroundings. You are in a room, more lab than recovery room. It is clean, and you smell disinfectant, plastic, metal. You recall that the life-saving operation involved extensive reconstruction, replacement of body parts, transplants.
Soon you become fully awake and remember that there was more - you had agreed to be replaced, a piece at a time with bio-mechanical parts. As you begin to interact with your surroundings the primary researcher - your doctor - explains that once they started replacing, they had to continue as infection was spreading rapidly.
There is now no original cell remaining of your body.
Are you still you? Are you even alive?
What is the difference between a "you" that has been programmed to look and act like you and a you that has been maimed to the point that you cannot be recognized nor interact with the world? You may claim that "you" would know the difference. But what about the rest of us? What makes us "us?"
My thought today is that Faith is what makes us real. Faith is what tips the scale from a complex of emergent properties over to a living soul.
Not by our strength, even the "strength of our faith." This is the simple faith, "child-like," which accepts that what God has given simply is. How does this work? Well, faith, of course.
It isn't a matter of belief, as such. Believing a thing doesn't make it so. Faith is not equivalent to belief. You may believe that a thing is so, based on evidence, observation, prediction. You can believe that because it has always been it will always be, etc etc. Belief may yet be wrong. Faith is the acceptance of what is so despite lack of evidence, despite evidence to the contrary. Where belief fails, faith moves mountains.
Faith is knowing you are alive.
Faith is knowing you are you.
Faith is knowing Jesus saves.
You can't have faith that is "strong enough". But faith can make you strong enough.
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