Do you have Faith?

"I believe Lord; help my unbelief!" – Mark 9: 24

            This was the question that was posed every day of my life. My answer in the past used to be that Life is too short for answering such an unnecessary question. After all whether God exists or not, what am I but a speck of dust before him. I really didn’t have the time to answer any of these questions in the past. I didn’t have the time to overlook my faith, because I was so busy overlooking myself. Life I used to say was too small for God; or I used to ask why would God love a creature like me anyways? As silly as the idea initially seemed to me, the irony behind it is, now I serve the one I cannot see. One of the most interesting quotes from the teachings of St. Augustine is “Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.”

Faith is one of the most overused and most misinterpreted words in the perspective of the secular media. To the secular society, faith is just to believe. Sometimes faith is just to show how you believe.  Faith is not only to believe; rather it is to put oneself in service of another. Faith is not only to impose believes, but also to trust.

 When soldiers fight battles, they do not fight it for themselves; they fight battles for the sake of their friends and families. We entrust our lives to these young men to protect our country. We put trust in the hands of politicians who serve this country, but yet sometimes we fail to trust in God. God demands not only belief. St. Alphonsus Ligori in his, Sermons for all Sundays of the year, tells us that even the devil trembles in fear in the belief that God exists. To have faith requires not only belief, but it requires trust, perseverance, love and service. All of this defines the value of the Catholic life and the value of faith. This is what it means to have faith in God, it is not merely to believe that he exists, but also to trust him and to put our lives down for him. This mere definition carves a huge difference between a saint and a devil. We are called to not only believe, but also trust him even amidst the storms of the seas of life.