In the “Testimonies” section of this website, I’ll be featuring some of the 2,600 personal e-mails I received after my story, “Religion Beat Became a Test of Faith,” was published last year. I started with my favorite because it was so gripping, moving and honest.
Your column … resonated with me because I find myself at the same spiritual crossroad. Having been raised to believe in a just God, my faith was shaken when my husband and I lost our ten-year-old child to Cystic Fibrosis, a congenital disease for which there is no cure.We felt betrayed that a loving God could bring such pain to parents who lived by the Golden Rule and followed the Ten Commandments. As we coped with our grief, we couldn’t help but wonder why our love for our child wasn’t enough to keep her alive and why our faith wasn’t bringing us any comfort.
After losing another child to the same illness, we came to the conclusion that we were naïve to believe in the Sunday School version of a deity that sits in a place called heaven and doles out rewards for good behavior and punishment for bad. We have only to look at world events and know this isn’t true.
So, who to pray to? An impersonal deity who lets bad things happen to good people? We still haven’t figured that out. But it is difficult to abandon a life-long belief. As spiritual beings our souls cry out for something to fill the vacuum. I’ve even considered going back to church in the hope of recapturing that leap of faith, but, as you so eloquently stated, “there’s no faking your faith if you’re honest about the state of your soul.”
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1 response so far ↓
1 Matt // May 11, 2008 at 10:42 pm
Mr. Lobdell, I can assure you that there is no god. The individuals claiming “god” is testing you know less about a god than they do about what is going where the origins of man were discovered by Dr. Louis Leakey in Africa dating man’s origins back millions of years. The only man whom I have met that actually talked the talk and walked the walk of his faith was the Rev. Billy Graham. The rest love the money, the notoriety, the lifestyle. Ask Rev. Rick Warren why he lives in a multi-million dollar home and purchases his clothes at Neiman Marcus. Ask those who purchase “The Secret” what does $ have to do with a god. The fact is you hit on exactly what it is all about: Money and power. Make no mistake. I admire you and wish you well. Your quantitative analysis of it illuminated the truth.
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