A few weeks ago I wrote that I believe God created us with a spiritual component – an eternal dimension that transcends time and substance. Today I’ll suggest he also put a faith capacity in us that is not separate from the spiritual, but reaches into our other personal dimensions as well. Perhaps my thoughts will cause you to stop, sip your coffee and ponder.

Usually when we talk about “faith” we tend to tie it to spiritual subjects – some folks even want to divorce the subject of faith from their life, suggesting it’s not important to them. I invite you to consider faith from a broader view that’s more in the context of what even our New Testament writers had in mind.

When the words faith, trust and believe appear in our New Testament, we’re looking at words that are related to each other in the language they were translated from. And, these are not complicated words or concepts. Faith simply means to be persuaded or convinced. Thus, when my mind has received enough information to build my case on, I believe it to be so, and I will trust the conclusion I’ve drawn – that’s faith. If I trust you, that means I’ve come to believe something about you – based on whatever information I’ve gathered, whether true or false – and that means I have faith in you. While we may not truly understand, these words are tied into our lives in such a deep, practical, conceptual manner that we will never be able to cut them out.

Consider that the economic situation in the world today seems to be in a little bit of trouble.

“A little bit of trouble?!” you say – or scream at me. And, if we look at history, we see that over the past several hundred years there have been numerous crashes of major civilizations and the subsequent meltdown of their economic systems and those tied to them. We even find coins today that represent the trading symbols of these past systems that have no other value to us today than an historic value; they have no trading value in our current system.

Some folks have purposely manipulated our currently troubled system for their gain while others have ignorantly involved themselves in the system and made less than wise decisions. What I’m saying here is that some folks have lied and cheated their way to fortune or failure, while others have, in good faith, attempted to play nice in the financial sandbox with the hope of getting a fair payoff for their efforts – and the system and many of its players are still broke. Given enough time – up to a couple hundred years – the systems of the world will fix themselves and we’ll be back in the same possibility for failure once again. In the process of waiting for the fix, we’ll all look with expectation that the phoenix will rise from the ashes and the economy will right itself, hopefully in my lifetime so I can be comfortable and my kids and grandkids can live warm and well fed and in relative safety.

I don’t know for sure, but I do trust that it will right itself. That’s what I believe. I have that faith. I can’t prove it, but history provides a clue with evidence that it will all be OK; perhaps not in my lifetime, but I’ll still live like I trust it will be OK in my lifetime.

That’s faith. To say that we live without faith is just not an accurate statement, because we all live by some sort of faith structure. If your faith structure reaches into the surface of time and stuff and money and places and acquiring and not dying, then you may be feeling a lot of anxiety in this financial, economical fiasco. However, if you have a faith structure that has a foundation reaching into the spiritual and God and eternity and a hope beyond time and space, then you’re finding some peace and tranquility beyond conventional understanding in these disturbing economic and social times.

I’m not building my life on just any faith structure. I happen to be devoted to a faith walk that’s nearly 2,000 years old and we’ll be celebrating the biggest day of my spiritual faith life in just a few days – Easter Sunday. My faith is that on Easter I celebrate, by faith, that my life is bigger than this life of time and space here on this dirt ball we call earth that hurtles through the cosmos at breakneck speed, and that my life will count for eternity beyond time…and economy.

I gotta quit now. How’s your faith life?

P.S. – Our Cedar Street building is nearing completion in the rebuilding process after the fire in July. We still gather at at 1:30 p.m. Sundays at Grace Lutheran, 525 S. Division St., Buckley.

You can e-mail Dale Pratt at dale@cedarcommunitychurch.org.