Hebrews Chapter 11
Mood:  rushed
Usual disclaimer: If this isn't your bag, no worries. Most of my posts have nothing to do with this so check those out or wait for my next post
HOWEVER, this particular one doesn't really have too much to do with the Bible at all, so feel free to read it and see what I mean
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So I've skipped a few chapters. Basically what happened is that I would put the computer away and then remember that I wanted to post about what I felt and what I thought each chapter meant. We'll just skip those. At any rate, today's chapter is a very famous and well quoted one.

I'm not going to go verse-by-verse through the whole chapter The stories recounted are very well-known and anyone who ever went to church a half-dozen times knows them.

Basically, the entire chapter is about the power of faith. "Faith is the evidence of things unseen" our authoer tells us. It seems a bit circuitous doesn't it? This chair exists because I believe that it exists. What evidence do I have that it exists? If it didn't exist I wouldn't have the faith to say that it did. I'm sure that I'm slightly botching this up, but I think that you get my point.

One, almost cliche, example often given involves the wind. Wind is completely invisible yet there is no one who would deny its existence. Flags wave, trees sway and sometimes even destruction can occur from this force that we are unable to see. In the same way, the fact that we can't see God should not be reason for an automatic negation of His existence. If you have some logical proof for His non-existence, then that's a different story. However, simply saying that you cannot see God is not sufficient in any logical arguement to say that He is not real.

What does faith mean to me? Well, in a sense faith allows one to take risks knowing that the end result will be ok. I'm not just talking about religious faith, but faith in anything. I'll return to a non-religous example momentarily, but allow me to consider a religious one. By faith I may take the action of trying to save an old lady from a burning building. I may use faith to reason that since no one else wants to help her (I'm assuming there are no firemen around nor will they be arriving soon) that it must be God's will for someone to save her. Therefore, I would go in and try to save her without fear of dying. However, many people may call this irrational. They say that faith is just a comfort blanket for acting wildly. I think that my non-religious example will prove helpful in dispelling this fact.

I borrow this anecdote from the famous Tony Robbins: I claim that driving requires an act of faith. Why is that? When one drives, what guarantee does he have that the cars in the oncoming lane will remain in their lane and not cross into his? What assurances are there that the cars in front of him will not suddenly begin to go backwards? There are absolutely no assurances. Yes, there are rules, but we all know that people break rules; sometimes it's intentional and sometimes it's not. However, as you drive you have no guarantees. Therefore, in order to drive without it being a mentally taxing effort or causing one to have a breakdown, one must have faith that all of the other cars on the road will follow the rules. Without this faith it is impossible to drive.

Another example, just walking around the city. You have faith that the police presence and the consequences of their actions will keep others from asaulting you, robbing you, or otherwise incringing upon your rights. Without this faith you become nurotic. In fact, there's even a term for these people, agorophobics. They can't be outside (for a variety of reasons) and sometimes the reason is that they believe they will be assaulted.

Basically all of life is an exercise in faith. Those who can't have enough faith in a particular domain of their life then have fears or phobias in that area.

That is what faith means. It doesn't have some mystical religious overtone or anything. We just don't speak of faith too often outside of church.

I really don't have much else to say. While the purpose of the chapter was to give example of faith in an attempt to get the reader to understand it, I think that I've done it in an updated way. At any rate, as I said, the people they mention are the "stars" of the Bible anyway - Noah, Abraham, and Moses, to name a few. If you're insanely curious about it, just pick up a Bible. They're everywhere and often there are people willing to give them away.

The gideons used to pass them out sometimes as we left high school back all those (3) years ago. But that's a story for another post.

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Post script: If anything is horribly misspelled, grammatically incorrect or incoherent, I apologize, but if you note the time of day when I made the post, I think you can forgive me, right? q:o)