Nowadays, faith is a touchy subject considering the person sitting next to you could be of a different faith and take offense to you expressing yours.  They might be Jewish, Lutheran, or even atheist.  Some people are pretty content on believing in their own religion; others are a bit open-minded.  Trying to explain your faith to others who are willing to listen is hard considering they could believe totally opposite.  For example, I’m Catholic and I believe in God…however, I cannot prove he exists.

 

God and his Son have been believed in, in my religion, ever since it was founded.  For centuries, people have continued my religion even though no one has ever been able to prove God exists.  Can they prove him now?  NO.  No matter how much evidence and how much the Bible explains him, no one has ever gotten rock-hard evidence God has existed.  Don’t get me wrong, I believe as much as the next guy, but I like to see things for myself.  Unless you can make him appear in front of me, I will always just believe in him purely due to my faith.

 

I believe in God 99%.  That other 1% has to do with science.  Science disproves everything supernatural and “other-worldly.”  I love science and everything about it, and even though my faith is strong, there will always be that teeny, tiny part of me that believes that science proves God, heaven, and everything else cannot possibly exist.  You can go ahead and say I’m wrong but, like I said before, you cannot say you’re right.  Science and religion have only one thing in common, they both cannot prove each other wrong.  Science may say God did not exist, but how do you know?  The same can be said for religion.  How do you know God DID exist?

 

Do I believe in God?  Yes.  Do YOU have to believe in him?  No.  You have your own mind, your own thoughts, and your own decisions.  God is one of the world’s biggest mysteries that can never be solved as long as you are alive.  To some people, God is real, for they have witnessed his hand at play.  For me, I’ve seen a sign of God through my entire life, yet I’ve never seen him.  So you might ask, “How do I witness something I haven’t seen?”  My answer to you is, “God is more than just a man, he is the love you have for someone else, he is the feeling you get in the center of your chest, he is the voice in the back of your mind, God is everything in me, he is everything in you too.  Why shouldn’t I believe in myself?”

 

Sometimes you wish email were never invented, don’t you?  Well, I do and I know I’m not alone.  I am constantly bombarded by ads, political messages, dumb, lengthy “forwards” from people with nothing better to do, and even pornography!  But, every once in a while, an email arrives that really touches me and makes me remember anew the real values in life.

Such was the case with the email that I’d recently received from a good friend.  He’d asked me to pass it along to my friends via email.  But, after reading the story, I’d decided that it really deserved a much broader audience.  Ergo, it’s positioning as a featured article on writeonnewjersey.com.

Here is the story.

A little girl had been shopping with her mom in Wal-Mart.  About six years old, she was a beautiful, red-haired, freckled faced girl, the image of innocence.  I spied her as I stood, with a group of other shoppers, beneath the store’s awning just outside the entrance to Wal-Mart.  It was pouring: the kind of rain that gushes over top of the rain gutters and blurs your vision if you’re driving.

Some of us waited patiently for the downpour to let up, while others were irritated because nature had interrupted their busy schedules.  I am always mesmerized by rainfall.  I get lost in the sounds and sights of the heavens, washing away the dirt and dust of the world.   That day, memories of my childhood flooded me as the rain flooded the store’s parking lot; memories of running and splashing through puddles were a welcome reprieve from the worries of the day.

Over the pounding of the rain, the little girl spoke.  Her voice was so sweet as it broke the hypnotic trance in which I’d found myself.  “Mom,” the child said, “let’s run through the rain.”

“What?!?” her mother replied.

“Let’s run through the rain,” the child repeated reasonably.

“No, honey,” said her mother.  “We’ll wait until it slows down a bit.”

The child waited a minute until she once again urged, “Let’s run through the rain!”

By then, everyone within earshot was listening to the little girl’s pleas as well as her mother’s logical response: “We’ll get soaked if we do.”  But the little girl tugged at her mother’s arm and observed, “That’s not what you said this morning.”

Perplexed, her mother asked, “This morning?  When did I say that we could run through the rain and not get wet?”

“Don’t you remember?” the child replied.  “When you were talking to Daddy about his cancer, you said, “If God can get us through this, He can get us through anything!”

At that point, while the young mother pondered the situation, the only sound to be heard was the rain beating on the awning.  After a long moment, the mother must have realized that her child’s insistence represented a moment of affirmation, a moment when innocent trust could be nurtured into faith.

Suddenly, the mother spoke up.  “Honey, you are absolutely right.  If God lets us get wet, I guess he figured we needed a washing!”

Then off they ran, smiling and laughing as they dodged cars and splashed through puddles until they reached their car.  And yes, they got soaked.  They were followed by a few of us who screamed and laughed like children playing in the rain, all the way to our cars.

And yes.  I also guessed that God felt I’d needed a washing too!

I cannot claim to be the author of this story; only the messenger. But, the Good Book says, “To everything, there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.”  Though it all — the sunny times of our lives and intense downfalls — God brings us small yet monumental signs to light the path of our ever-twisting journey on this Earth. And sometimes those signs spring from the mouths of babes, who are somehow wiser than we older folk.