Tuesday Truths: Why I Believe

Recently, a friend asked me why I believe in Christ and how old I was when I accepted Him.

It seemed like such a simple question. 

Yet, when forming my actual response, I realized that faith–while simple to believe in–is so much deeper.  It is so much deeper, because it is truly the one thing that touches every piece of my core.  It is at the foot of each of my decisions.  It is my compass and my guide.

Like many, I was baptized as a tot.  At the tender age of two-months old, both sides of my family gathered together and I snoozed as water was poured over my head.  Perhaps you can say that I accepted Christ then.

Then there was that time when I was three-years-old and I found my first pet, Tweety the Bird, dead  in his cage.  This incident rocked my young self to the core, as I could did not comprehend what I then believed to be the finality death.  I remember sitting in a rocking chair in my parents’ living room just sobbing for what seemed like hours and lamenting over Tweety’s departure from this world. 

Finally, my grandmother came over to our house and consoled me.  She said, “Alicia, do you believe in Jesus?”  My mom took me to church every week and taught me Bible stories, so I said, “Yes.”  She said, “Well, if you believe in Jesus, you’ll get to see Tweety again in heaven.”  It was that hope that my young self needed to calm my fears.  It was that hope, that propelled me at a young age into a believer.

I have enjoyed a very good life.  At the same time, though, it has not always been easy.  There have been moments of deep hurt in my life, where I am grateful that I had a relationship with Jesus to turn to in order to get through them.  Losing the first person to capture my heart in a freak car accident.  Watching my beloved grandmother battle and succumb to Alzheimer’s disease.  Sitting by helplessly in a hospital waiting room when a chaplain said I should say my last goodbyes to my mom because the doctors didn’t think she’d make it.  Talking to my dad in a hospital room at 3 a.m. about Jesus on the night that led to him being diagnosed with cancer in 2008.  These moments in my life were painful, stressful, and frightening.  Yet, turning those feelings over to God allowed me to move through them with grace.  I believe that if my faith was not as strong as it is, I would have reacted to each of those situations in different, less honorable ways.

The simple reason for my faith is this:  Hope.

There is nothing on this planet that provides the type of hope that a relationship with Christ does.  When you look at the world on its own, you realize that it is a broken place.  The globe is filled with hurt and despair.  To not have a relationship with God, to me, means excepting that the hurt and despair of the world is the best that there is.  To me, it means not believing that someday, a perfect world free from hurt and despair exists.

For me, hope has always been the belief of something bigger than myself that is capable of bringing more peace than I can even imagine.  And for me, I have placed that hope in the Lord, for my knowledge and personal experience of the peace that only He is capable of brining in times of hurt.  It is this belief that has provided the calm necessary for me to move out of many of the storms of my life and onto smoother paths.  For that, I am grateful of my relationship with Christ and for the fact that I am a believer.

Why do you believe?