Press “play” above to hear me read the letter to you.
Most people can’t walk you through why they think what they think, or why they believe what they believe. It’s easier to assume that if you went through what they did, you’d agree with them.
It’s easier to take their beliefs on faith.
I get it; it’s hard. Our brains are wired to make quick judgments and then justify them later. That can make sense when you’re avoiding a dangerous driver, but you might regret responding in anger when someone interrupts you.
The more important a belief is to your life, the more you owe it to yourself to know why you believe it.
And one of the most impactful beliefs is what you believe about where God is.
In my late teens, I invited my youth pastor out for a chat. We met at a Tim Horton’s and sat down with what passes for coffee there. The weight of isolation had been growing on me for a while, so I asked him, “Why don’t I feel like God is there?”
He said, “I don’t always feel like God is there either. It’s not about that. You just have to keep going.”
There’s a silver lining of truth to his statement: Don’t give up.
But if he didn’t know where to find God, how could he help me? I’m not even sure he had faith in his own beliefs. I don’t know what he had faith in.
I thought I had faith in something solid. But my feeling of isolation only grew and the people who could have helped my faith destroyed it instead.
I came to realize that I had faith in the people around me, rather than faith in the God they represented. It was good to have my misplaced faith destroyed, but we’ll talk more about that in a second.
What do you have faith in?
I’m not asking you to take any of my beliefs on faith. While you can never eliminate a leap of faith because you have to accept something to make it your own, you can understand a belief before you take a leap.
Yes, that means science requires a leap of faith, too. This is what the Law of Induction proves, which is the ability to make inferences from incomplete data, like, “All the swans I’ve seen are white so all swans are white.”
One of my favourite scientific inferences was the supposed discovery that neutrinos could go faster than light. That’s not supposed to be possible.
After two years and more than fifteen thousand experiments, the group’s spokesperson said, “We are confident in what we did and we think we did it correctly.”
Turns out, they forgot to include the amount of time it took the computer signal to go through a cable.
Inference is not certainty.
I don’t like taking leaps of faith. But they are necessary, so at least it’s better to understand what you’re leaping onto before you leap.
Accepting a belief is a three-step process: first, you have a conclusion to come to, then you follow a path to understanding it, and, you take a leap of faith at the right places on the path.
This is what I mean by “a map.”
I can’t remove the need to jump, but I can point out where a jump is required.
The scientists observing neutrinos believed they had done everything correctly, but that was a leap of faith that wasn’t rewarded even after two years of careful examination by a group of 150 experts.
A map doesn’t just show you the conclusions you could come to, it shows you where to take a leap of faith and how to get there from where you are.
A map has conclusions on the path, rather than a single conclusion or belief because most beliefs can be broken down into other beliefs. Rather than taking one giant leap of faith, you can take several smaller ones.
There are three beliefs that my map requires in order to follow it to the end:
Faith is unavoidable
Purpose implies authority
Eternity matters
We’ll talk about 2 and 3 in the next two letters.
I could prove to you using logic that faith is unavoidable, but I’ve never found logic to be convicting. Useful, yes, but in a kind of post hoc way; it took an emotional understanding of why faith is unavoidable to convince me.
If you want the logical puzzle to chew on while we talk about stories, here it is: logic describes the implications and relations of axioms, but where do the axioms come from? They are assumptions, and an assumption is another way to say “taken on faith.”
As an example, science is built on the assumption that the past predicts the future (that’s the Law of Induction). This is reasonable in lots of areas, but we see exceptions to it all the time—and we make wrong inferences with seemingly huge amounts of data.
The belief that the past predicts the future is reasonable, but it’s an assumption too.
The best attempt to prove that the past predicts the future would be if you observed from the beginning of history to the end of time. You’d have the maximum amount of data that anyone could ever collect.
But even if you found a way to completely predict how history unfolded, who’s to say that your theory described why it actually happened that way? A description after the fact is not the same as a cause before the fact. Your theory might even be wrong in the very next instant of time.
To really know if the past predicted the future, you’d have to go back to before the beginning of history and see what started history. You’d have to see what rules history followed.
But those rules precede history, they are not consequences of history.
The consequences of a belief do not prove the belief they only describe it.
No matter how reasonable it seems to believe that the past predicts the future, you still have to take it on faith to begin with.
What convinced me that faith was necessary, what gave me an emotional understanding of faith, was losing the faith I had in who God was as I grew up.
It is perhaps the greatest tragedy in the world that we are born isolated. Just as a baby’s umbilical cord must be cut, we are born without a connection to our creator.
Instead of connecting with the one who made us, made everything, and could fulfil us, we connect with the imperfect people around us.
We are stuck with their representation of who God is. And it can’t be perfect, because they aren’t perfect. They are not God.
A child doesn’t know this. A child’s faith in their parents is absolute—for a while.
I was a skeptical child, but even partial faith in a parent leaves a mark.
I was thirteen when I lost faith in the connection with my dad. I was sitting in my computer chair, depressed. We had moved and I had nothing to do and no one to do it with, except my younger brother. But that’s not why I was depressed.
I was depressed because I felt like my life wasn’t worth living. If the best I could do was live in isolation until I died, why bother living? I might have been thirteen, but I could feel the futility of being disconnected from my creator.
My dad came down and tried to empathize. “When I was your age, I was depressed too. I really wanted a guitar.”
It’s hilarious in hindsight, but I knew a guitar—or any other thing I could hold—wasn’t going to do it for me. So I knew my dad didn’t understand me, at least at the time.
What I lost at that moment was faith in my dad’s implicit understanding of me. I didn’t even know I had it until I lost it. But then it was gone.
That’s not the loss of faith that caused me to leave my church, and faith in God, behind.
In my late teens, there was a dispute that arose between someone else and myself in the church youth group. It came up months after the supposed event, and I’m still not sure why the other person involved viewed it the way they did.
The pastor and one of the associates were going to mediate between the two of us, which is how disputes should be handled. But when it came time for all of us to meet, the pastor and the associate surprised me by being the only ones there.
In that little meeting room in the church, they levelled accusations at me, assumed why I had done what I was accused of doing, and told me why I was the kind of person who would do it. I had never met the associate before and barely had a relationship with the pastor. I was so overwhelmed I couldn’t say much, but the little I did say was shot down as lies.
I lost the implicit faith I didn’t know I had in the ones that explicitly represented God.
I lost my faith in God’s goodness. And I still didn’t know where He was, I only knew He couldn’t be there.
I tell you this story because it is hard to see that you need faith until you have lost it.
I had an implicit faith in the people that represented God. I trusted them to be like God and to show me who God was. I trusted them to value me and connect with me, like God would.
But because they weren’t God, they destroyed my faith. And it was good that my faith was destroyed.
Let me tell you what it doesn’t mean that they destroyed my faith: It doesn’t mean there is no God. It doesn’t mean that God is evil, accusatory, or distant.
The only thing it means is that those people failed at that time. They did not represent God in their failure.
Because they failed, I lost the faith I shouldn’t have put in them in the first place. I should have been looking for God without relying on an imperfect human representative to show him to me.
And because I lost that faith, I found just how necessary it was to have faith in the right representation of God. That no matter what I thought of God, it was an act of faith to believe in my idea of God.
I needed a perfect representation of God. It took a long time before I could identify one.
I tried not to have faith at all, after that. But that turned out to be another form of faith in myself. And I let myself down pretty badly, too.
But that’s a story that supports next week’s topic: being a purposer, and how that implies authority.
Thanks for listening.
An important letter. Thank you. I often take leaps of faith to shred the anxious energy that comes with life’s uncertainties.
I'm not religious, but have enjoyed your raw writing. It takes a lot of courage - or maybe faith is the better word - to be so honest about who you are and what you believe.
I also love the images. Are you the one who makes them?