Have faith is not really like saying be tall and shapely. It’s more like saying be okay with the bulge and with having to wear Spanx.
Have faith and wait!
And yet there was something about it that was exceedingly fragile; it was as if Chinedu could conceive of faith only in extremes, as if an acknowledgment of a middle ground would mean the risk of losing everything.
I can believe what I want to believe.
It seems to me that organized creeds are collections of words around a wish.
She wanted to interrupt and tell him how unnecessary it was, this bloodying and binding, this turning faith into a pugilistic exercise; to tell him that life was a struggle with ourselves more than with a spear-wielding Satan; that belief was a choice for our conscience always to be sharpened.
Faith is about doing. You are how you act, not just how you believe.
Knowing it—knowing it’s true is one thing, but believing what you know … well, there’s the tough part. We all prepare for jolts along the way, disturbances of the peace, the lies, the evasions, the infidelities—if they happen.