There’s been a winter weather event in most of the country. Last night and today, there have been really strong cold winds in my part of Texas. While I was going to sleep last night and this morning as I was working the winds were so strong that it sounded like a strong force was knocking up against the house. When I used to work in an office building and there were strong winds, I would go to the stairways and it would sound like banshees were howling in the stairways making their way up and down the floors the building.
Both of these two noises can easily be explained by the wind and the way it behaves when it moves against the my house and the office building, but it takes a little faith on my part. After all, I can’t really see the wind. I can feel it a little. However, I am just relying on my knowledge of science to believe that the noise is the wind instead of some supernatural force.
I often see things that I know aren’t there because of my OCD. For example, if I am feeling especially itchy, then I will see insects crawling on the walls out of the corner of my eye. Then when I focus on the wall, there will be nothing there. The whole situation makes me wonder about reality itself.
Things I can’t see, like the wind, are really there, but the insects I think I see aren’t really there at all. So, I can rely on my senses to give me some idea of the world around me, but my senses can be unreliable. And there’s no way to tell, if what I see is the same as what everyone else sees. In fact, if you think about people who are color blind, it is obvious that some people don’t see the same things that others see.
I often wonder if so much is unreliable, what can I rely on? What can I know to be real? There’s even the idea that our whole existence could be some virtual reality like the movie The Matrix or someone’s dream. I don’t have those answers. I don’t know if any of it is real, except for one thing. I know God is real and I know love is real. I also know that even if everything else is an illusion, my faith and love aren’t. That thought comforts me. When I think at any moment everything I have, even my life could be suddenly stripped away, I know that my love will go on. That’s what I have faith in. That’s what give me hope.
My faith saved me. May God’s peace reside in all of our hearts.
