Blind Faith

Most people consider “Blind Faith” to be completely unreasonable. In the common view, you take something that you want to believe in and despite the lack of evidence in it, and even evidence to the contrary, you just decide to believe it. How silly. This is how Christians are portrayed  Superstitious. Simple Minded. Looking for a crutch to help them through life because they don’t want to face reality.

But that’s nonsense. Faith is not choosing to believe something despite any evidence to the contrary. Faith is coming face to face with something so wondrously true that you can’t help but believe it and remember it, even when you lose sight of it, and are driven by the hope that one day you will come to see it again.

Blind faith is believing the sun will come up again even in the middle of the night.

Ask anyone who has come to faith in their adult years. Ask them for their testimony. They will tell you of an experience. Now, Christianity is not just about an experience. It’s not about that one moment when we walked an aisle or when we said a prayer, but there’s something very real that happens in those moments. Like Paul on the road to Damascus, it’s in those moments that we meet God. And in those moments, we see reality so clearly that we suddenly see everything else in a new light. In those moments we see God himself and we surrender ourselves to him. Then we walk out into the world and are bombarded by a whole world that has never met him.

We are not children believing in Santa Claus.
We are Lucy Pevensie who KNOWS she saw Aslan on the other side of the river and wants nothing more than to go to him.

We are not mindless automatons going through motions trying to just add numbers to our group and notch our belts
We are the mayor of Whoville who has heard Horton’s voice and is so convinced of this reality that he’s willing to look like an idiot in front of the rest of the Whos in order to save them from the destruction he knows is imminent, even if they don’t believe him.

I love that scene from Horton Hears a Who. The movie really did a fantastic job with that. I don’t know what Dr. Seuss’s intent was with this. I know his overall theme was “A person’s a person no matter how small,” but I don’t know if he also had blind faith in mind either. I’m certain the film makers did not intend this to be an analogy for faith, but it still came out so well.

In the scene I’m thinking of, the mayor is trying to convince the Whos that Horton is out there even though he’s the only one who has ever heard him, and there’s a point at which he’s standing in front of his house trying to communicate with Horton so they will hear him, and in the midst of his frantic attempts to make contact, they collectively give him this LOOK.

The look said it all. “This guy’s crazy. He’s a nut. He’s lost his marbles”. And here’s the thing: They’d be right! IF Horton wasn’t up there! All the subtle accusations levied toward Christians – that we’re just superstitious or backwards and stuck in old traditions, etc, etc – All of those would be true, if Christ was not real. But as anyone who has met Christ can attest, he is real. But unless you meet him for yourself, there’s no way to convince you. So we are at an impasse. There’s no empirical evidence that can pass scientific muster. But that doesn’t make it any less true.

Blind faith is not choosing to believe the unbelievable.
Blind faith is choosing to hold fast to the undeniable.