Life, Love, and Everything In Between

Here is an old school myspace style blog for all y'all

i just recently went back and read all of my blogs off of my myspace page. I wrote on a lot of deep subjects back then, i pondered things that deserved to be pondered, i also spelled way worse.

This one is about faith i guess. I've been reading Soren Kierkegaards "Fear and Trembling", he comments on faith quite a bit, actually, that's what the book is about. A couple passages really struck me. He says to really understand God you must make a personal leap of faith. You cannot have the faith of someone else, or ride the 'coat-tails' of people that are more faithful, it must be your own actions. I know this seems so simple, but in practice its much more difficult. He gives a nice annecdote. Its about someone learning to swim. He says that you can try to describe swimming to someone, you can even lower them into a pool and hang them from a rope to the waist and have them pretend to swim, but they are still not swimming. They can say they are swimming, describing the movements perfect. They may even appear to be swimming. This though is not swimming. To swim you must jump in head first surrounded by the water. This is like faith. I can tell you that i believe in God, i can tell you how to believe in God, but the only one that knows for sure is me. Faith is only tested for sure in the tough times, you only know if you have faith when disaster and hardtimes are all around you, trying to drown you like cold water. Only then do you really practice faith.
He also talks about a young man who falls in love with a princess. The young man believes will all his heart that he will someday have the princess, even though this is impossible because he is not royalty. He devotes his entire life to the princess, and has one chance to get her. At the moment that he asks her to marry him, she turns him down. This is because he is not royalty, but unphased he still believes that he will marry her. Keikegaard says that this is faith.

What im trying to say is that faith is a personal issue that only you yourself know. This is not really that far fetched an idea, but when this book was written it was, and it still shakes you everytime you read the words. Highly recommend is. Fear and Trembling - Soren Keirkegaard
peace,
don

posted by That Canadian Guy @ 4:21 p.m.