Faith, Trust and Pixie Dust

We've all heard that “curiosity killed the cat”.  And because I have an insatiable curiosity myself, I needed to know where that phrase came from.  It’s been around a long time and even Shakespeare quoted it in “Much Ado About Nothing”.  The first form of the expression came from the English playwright Ben Jonson as far back as 1598. It implies that over-investigation may have undesirable consequences. We’ve also been told that cats have nine lives.  I had a cat once that seemed like it could have nine lives because it survived several seemingly unsurvivable incidences, but we all know that the probability of that being true is slim to none.  And while we’re asking, how do cats always manage to land on their feet?  Now you see how my mind works – from one question to the next. 

I think highly curious people are those who don’t just ask a lot of questions, but have a hard time being satisfied with not knowing the answers.  Google, Siri, Alexa and YouTube are best friends to people, who like myself, have a drive for understanding and knowledge about anything and everything.  Just the other day I Googled, “how to design a story for Instagram”, and in three easy steps, I sorted it (watch out Instagram followers!).  Those sites are also helpful for some of us who may not remember things as well as we used to (please refer to previous blog post about memory).

But….and it’s a BIG but…..there are some things we don’t get to know answers for.  We can guess at answers, or we can play with a variety of possible answers, or we can accept that sometimes there aren’t definitive answers. That’s tough for some of us.  Why in some places do people drive on the right side of the road and others on the left?  How do crumbs get in my silverware drawer when it’s nowhere near the toaster? Why are there so many different accents of the same language? How many licks till you get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?

I jest, but there are some questions in life that are much more serious and hard to understand.  When you ask those big questions and there seem to be no obvious answers, it requires a level of faith to accept that there are some things that we just can’t know.  If you’ve ever lost a loved one at a young age, you have a lot of questions.  When something bad happens to good people, you want to know the whys.  Questions as complex as these don’t have a logical, simple answers.  They challenge our faith.  I think they are supposed to. 

I have a strong faith that there is a God and that I have a relationship with Him.  I also think that God is so vast and unsearchable, that sometimes I can’t comprehend who He is or how He works.  I’m okay with that.  Some people aren’t.  My relationship trusts Him to know and do what is right and just and loving and good even when it doesn’t appear so to me.  For some people that doesn’t make sense.  I think sometimes religious institutions want to have all the answers tied up with a neat bow and those people who struggle with the all-too-tidy system that tries to explain hard things away, struggle with the perception of God that human organizations present. 

I recently read an interview with Dan Evans, husband of Rachel Held Evans, a young mother, author and blog writer, who died following a severe allergic reaction at the age of 37.  Rachel challenged some of the traditional views of faith and church life.  Whether you agree with her religious stances or not, she asked some of those hard questions many are afraid to.   After her death Dan said this, “I think sometimes in religion, we’re presented with things that we don’t know, and we don’t have to make a choice.  We can keep searching and learning more without being forced into a false sense of urgency. And so sometimes when I don’t know, I learn how to sit with that discomfort. I realize I don’t know, but also that I don’t have to know.”

There are things in this life that we will never fully understand.  There are things about God that in our humanity we can’t comprehend.  So as curious as I am about all things, I am required to have faith in the things that I can’t know and rest in that.  Scripture tells us that “faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1).  It’s hard to understand the concept of faith if you’ve never had it, but faith is the answer to how you respond when you ask the questions and don’t get answers.  I think author James Barrie, who wrote Peter Pan, was onto something.  “All the world is made of faith and trust and a little bit of pixie dust.”  The world could use more of all of those about now.