I watched a show last night with my husband with survival experts. We like to watch these reality shows. It always amazes me the difference of how the experts react to survival situations. All of them have learned the skills and know what they are doing. The problem is that some of them haven’t actually been in true situations where they needed to survive and some of them have. When I say true situations what I mean isn’t situations where they need to put their skills to the test, I mean situations where they feel bad and ill. Situations where they have to put their faith to the test.
What really amazes me is that some people would actually put themselves in situations where they are testing their own faith. It may be my OCD or it may be my adherence to the Bible story of Jesus in the dessert for forty days, but I don’t want to tempt fate and put my faith to any test. I know God is always going to be there. I don’t need any proof, and I don’t need to prove to myself that I believe it.
I think it is a strange concept to test your faith. I can give a few amazing examples from my own life of how it works. During the pandemic when people were so afraid and many were dying, I felt horrible because of the death and I felt such anxiety because of changes in my life and the hate that I saw on TV because the politicians couldn’t agree, but I didn’t worry for a second that God wouldn’t be with me through it. No for a second. A few years ago, my husband and I were in Oklahoma when there was a Tornado warning, and we had to go to the basement of the building we were in. It scared me. I didn’t know what would happen, but I didn’t worry that God wouldn’t be with me. I knew that come what may, God would guide me through it. Through every difficult time in my life, I have might have questioned God’s existence, but I never doubted it. I can’t imagine life without God. Everything else could change, but that one thing can’t. It’s the one thing that no one can take away from me. I understand without question now why people die for their faith. They can’t live without it.
And so on these survival shows, it isn’t about knowing how to live in the wilderness. Anybody can learn how to do that. I believe that the important part is having that living faith inside of you and not letting it die under any circumstances. And maybe the people who win those shows, at least some of them, don’t go to win the shows, maybe some of them go to live in the wilderness because they can and they have that faith that lives inside of them all the time. I would like to believe that I’m not the only one. I would like to believe there are millions of people all over the world who not only have the light of God within them, but also have faith within them. Not something that questions, but just believes.
My faith saved me. May God’s peace reside in all of our hearts.
