Wearily upward

When I was younger and, dare I say it, more naïve, I was part of many ministry teams and outreach groups. On one of these teams we did a spiritual gifts test, almost like a personality test, but for spiritual gifts. Faith (the ability to remember God's promises and to hold on to His Word amidst circumstantial difficulty) was one of my top ones. Since then my faith has been tested and have come up short, often. Now, facing overwhelming odds with no physical or material answers to very real questions, my faith is tested again. I don't know where the money and resources for all I believe God is calling me into will come from, which in itself makes me wonder whether God really is calling me into these things. I don't have enough faith, it seems. Not anymore. Almost like the man we read about in Mark 8:22-26. He was blind. By all accounts it was his friends who brought him to Jesus and asked Jesus to heal him. This man seems oddly quiet in the presence of Jesus, the one Person...

The world we live in seems fairly complex. We have devices connecting us to the immensity that is the World Wide Web. We have robots doing a multitude of jobs, from the simple and repetitive, to the complicated and even dangerous. We have televisions bringing LIVE pictures/videos from across the globe (and beyond... if you believe the moon landing really happened on the moon...). Stepping back (or stepping closer, sometimes) might reveal something surprising to many: All of the complexity in this world is built on fundamental, simple, basic mechanisms. Yes. The complexities of life can be boiled down to something a child can understand and use. The device you're reading this blog post on, whether it's a laptop or a smartphone, uses a binary system that translates and transmits data into a sequence of 1's and 0's. That's it. Every internet picture you've seen, video you've watched, message you've read is nothing more than a long succession of 1's ...