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June
10 |

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Today's
Quotation:
It need
not discourage us if we are full of doubts. Healthy questions
keep faith dynamic. In fact,
unless we start with doubts we cannot have
a deep-rooted faith.
One who believes lightly and unthinkingly has not much
of a belief. One who has a faith which is not to be shaken has won it
through
blood and tears-- has worked his or her way from doubt to truth as one
who reaches a clearing
through a thicket of brambles and thorns.
Helen
Keller
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Today's
Meditation:
Sometimes
in my life, I need validation. I need to know that I'm
not the only one who thinks a certain way or who believes in
certain things. This particular quotation was a
God-send to me, at a time when I was filled with doubts
about what was being told to me at church. I was
surrounded by people who seemed to feel that doubting was a
sign of a lack of faith, and some of them even would have
gone so far as to claim that any doubts I had must have come
from Satan himself.
There
is much to doubt in any religion, for the religious norms
and ceremonies that we witness today are the results of
people's interpretations of the Bible, not anything that was
mandated by God himself. We were given the gift of
logical thought, and we were given the gift of discernment,
and anyone who says that we don't have the right to doubt is
just afraid of losing the "power" that clinging to
religious traditions brings to him or her. Doubts send
us in directions that we never would explore if we were to
hold on blindly to beliefs that we adopt as our own from
others.
But
clinging to tradition and believing blindly the teachings of
others leads to a shallow spirituality. There's very
little opportunity in such an approach for a direct
relationship with God-- whatever we perceive God to be-- and without having gone through a
time of doubts, a faith never has been tested. It's
only by testing that we truly validate anything.
Do
you have doubts? Then embrace them, explore them, find
out all you can about them. Doing so will lead you to
a newer and more vibrant faith. It probably won't
happen immediately, and it may take much longer than you
ever were prepared to have to wait, but you will reach the
point of faith that you were meant to reach. And once
you're there, the chances are that more doubts will come up,
leading you down a completely new road that you're meant to
explore. . . .
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Questions to ponder:
1. What do you think that your
doubts are telling you? How do you respond?
2. How does a
blind faith help us to grow as people? Does it help our relationship with God, or does it just make
us
more acceptable to other people who share the faith?
3. What do you feel God wants you to
do--accept all that you hear,
or carefully consider all that you hear, and then make your
own
decisions about what you believe and what you don't? |
For further thought:
You
call for faith: I show you doubt,
to prove that faith exists. The more
of doubt, the stronger faith, I say, if faith o'ercomes doubt.
Robert Browning |
more
thoughts and ideas on doubt
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