Faith is Indomitable

Life is full of times that we will be unable to accurately interpret the evidences around us. There will be times when we are forced to make decisions about the future and in that choice no proven outcome will be guaranteed. This is where the rubber meets the road, and we can be either paralyzed by uncertainty, or we can adopt an indomitable spirit of faith. Faith is possessing the will to reach higher than our circumstances said we could, to push further than the limits said we should, to climb over what was seemingly insurmountable, and to overcome what no one in their right mind thought was possible. When we see these kinds of things happen in our world, we call them great. They are the product of the highest order of thinking available to us – faith. Faith is indomitable. 

Great men and women have led the way for us. When the skeptics and the nay-sayers said it couldn’t be done, some kept pushing with an indomitable faith and they did it anyway. When the evidence indicated there was little chance for survival, fireman James Drouin of Boston swam 200ft. across a broken ice shelf to rescue a young boy and win the Medal of Valor for his indomitable faith. When Dietrich Bonheoffer was told that returning to Germany to advocate for justice for the Jews would mean a death sentence for him, with indomitable faith he walked straight into the hangman’s noose. When oil rig driver David Morrison was told he’d never walk again after a massive head injury in a car accident, he recovered and went on to win a 10K marathon within five years.

When we hear a person try to convince us that faith is a belief in something that has no evidence, we need to stand up and tell the truth: that faith is the mechanism which proves itself worthy of our allegiance by creating its own evidence. The wheels of progress and innovation are greased by the indomitable faith of those who refuse to believe what their eyes are telling them, refuse to follow what the system has laid out for them, and refuse to abide by the futility of trusting what they think they know.

Evidence and empiricism are important like iron is important to your blood, but consume too much of it and you’ll have a poison running through your body and your mind that will end up squeezing the very life out of you. And we are being poisoned by a worldview that day in and day out tries to convince us that a belief in God is no better than a belief in Bigfoot. It is poison to our system and has led to a decay of our everyday decency.

Faith is not a blind leap in the dark. It is a hopeful step into the light.

The writer of Hebrews says, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.” That’s a definition of faith we should all be able to agree with. First, that faith is the product of hope. Lose all hope and we lose faith. Did you know that suicide rates among American teenagers saw their largest single year increase in fifteen years as reported by CDC last year? Did you know that 50% of American boys report feelings of hopelessness? Is it any wonder that we’ve seen such a massive increase in recreational drug use? There’s a vile poison infecting our well. It’s a poison that seeks to shackle our highest hopes by claiming that they are inherently misplaced because ideas are not real unless we can prove them scientifically.

Faith is itself evidence.  One day, I’m going to finish my book entitled, “Invisible Pink Economies.” The premise of the book stabs straight into the heart of this subject today: ideas are proven in their utility. A primary argument from unbelievers with regards to faith is that belief in God is akin to belief in invisible pink unicorns. It is an utterly ridiculous argument, because Invisible Pink Unicorns lack utility. They serve no function in our society or any other that we know of. Such refusal to be even remotely useful to us enable us to successful categorize IPU’s as a nonsensical idea.

But some ideas are in fact quite rational to hold, because they have a function. Our economy is one of these ideas. The concept of money isn’t real, but believing makes it so. I carry around a five dollar bill because I believe that I can get a gallon of gas a coke with it. I trust in its unreal value because it serves a real world function. By participating in banking, investing, and bartering I provide evidence that the economy is real. Our collective actions are evidence that this immaterial thing called “value” is real. But suppose we all decided that it wasn’t real, and we all took our money out of the markets and out of the banks. Suppose we refused to barter at all, what would happen to the economy? We’ve already seen what happens when you make loans with money that you don’t really have. Banks collapse from the failure to deposit more than is withdrawn. The sustainability of the markets depends on our faith in the system. In a sense, we are the evidence of the unseen.

God is more than just an idea, for sure, but faith works much the same way in our own lives. Our faith is the evidence of the unseen. As we work together and fellowship together, we stimulate each other to love and good deeds. The value of these things increases our hope and our confidence in the system by making faith deposits. Our greed, selfishness, and doubts make massive withdraws from the system and our hope begins to fail sending the market of our spirits into a tailspin, ready to crash and burn. 

So then, faith is the assurance of what we hope for, and the evidence of what we can’t see. These two truths work together to grease the wheel of the world. Without them, things come grinding to a halt.

I love the movie Empire Strikes Back. My favorite character in all the Star Wars movies is Han Solo. The reason Han Solo is so appealing to us is that he often acts courageously, in spite of his chances for success. "Never tell me the odds," he shouted out when C3PO told him the odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field.  He truly believed he could fly through it and all C3PO was doing was sucking the life out of his attempt.

Those are the kind of people with indomitable faith that I want in my locker room before the big game. They're the kind of people I want at my bedside when I'm given six months to live. the kinds of people I want my children to grow into. Indomitable, regardless of how much the “evidence” is leaning against them. Indomitable all the way to the end.

As for the "evidence" crowd out spreading their poison, please let the grown-ups innovate and overcome. Plug into the hyperdrive C-3PO and let us drive. I subscribe to the belief that a trustworthy idea is worthy of my time, energy, and devotion and I am not to be denied. Ideas are trustworthy to extent they have real and beneficial function. Faith in God meets all these criteria.

The value of science isn't lost on me, nor is the value of faith. I don't have to trade one for the other. I can act on evidence without being shackled by its traps. I can reach for the unproven and reach for my unrealized potential during my stay on this planet. I can do this precisely because I believe I can.

Also, I know who I want in my corner. When it comes to the many unquantifiable decisions I have to make in life, it's always going to be the people who have the creativity, the will, and the indomitable human spirit to reach higher and further than our collective expectations. In short, I want to surround myself with people who have great faith.

Mass Amnesia and My Summer Vacation

When I looked out at the Gulf of Mexico from the bow of the charter fishing boat, I couldn’t help but count the plastic. Old plastic never dies, it is instead broken down into ever decreasing smaller bits. At 5mm broken down plastics begin to coalesce with mirco-flora, sand, plankton, and other basic staples to the ocean’s health. When they get even smaller, they are absorbed through gills or eaten, and can enter the flesh of every living thing in the ocean.

My eyes glance back to the cooler behind me and the stringer of fish that bears my name, then back again to the 11^th floating water bottle our ship passed. I wonder what they taste like. Perhaps worse than my fish, the oceans corals, which provide habitat for ocean life, already have measured concentrations of a whole host of chemicals from plastics with names that most of us couldn’t pronounce. As these reefs continue to absorb our waste products, they recede, and further reduce the amount of healthy bio-matter sea life can consume, thereby escalating the amount of microplastic these organisms ingest.

The whole scene is to me, Macbethian: a downward spiral of betrayal and ego; a betrayal of God’s gift of ocean. This gift provides over 1/5 of Earth’s digestible protein and it is wasting away one plastic piece at a time as the fruit of our conveniences and apathy blend like tiny beads and infuse themselves with the sand.

Back home and on dry land, the summer subtleties of things like “regulation” and “environmental protection” are debated. In my experience, it is not the fishermen debating these things. Fishermen have historically been the planet’s first ecologists because throughout history, their livelihood depended on it. Recreational fisherman today can tell you and probably even take you to specific places where their catches have been impacted by human beings. For fisherman, the life and death cycle of their trade is sketched directly onto the canvas of the water. The old fishermen see it best and most clear.

Jesus chose fishermen to be his dearest friends and closest traveling companions. As I am transitioning into an old fisherman, I am beginning to see that he did so for very good reasons. Fisherman are keen observers with great memories. In the age before GPS marking, fisherman had to know their spots, remember each drop-off or sandbar or hidden stump that held their prizes. Fisherman know when these spots are perturbed; they have learned almost subconsciously to recognize changes and patterns, and adjust their day’s work accordingly.

For micro-plastics to go unnoticed by the average man, or for that strip-mining operation that dumps cyanide into our rivers and streams to carry on unfettered by regulation, a kind of mass amnesia would need to happen to the American people. That mass amnesia would need to be orchestrated by the corporations which benefit and their allies. No amount of damage done to a place matters much to the corporation doing the extracting or building the products. They have no intention of living in places where factories and mines and metals unleash their havoc. Once the resource is consumed or the product complete, they will do what all corporations do, and that is move on to the next money grab.

The wave of amnesia lifts for the average man only when the impacts are felt directly… but the fisherman knows I think, before the rest. She sees it happening season after season after season. She reads the canvas at the end of her fishing line, and in that instinctive space knows firsthand how human and water are meant to interact.

Jesus chose fishermen, I believe, because fishermen know life and are committed to sustain it. Fisherman are more resistant to the mass amnesia and have their own built in immune system to anything that affects their trophy spots. We see it first, and we know it when we see it, just like I could not help but count the plastic in the Gulf of Mexico.

We’ve elected a President who has hand-picked leaders around him to spread mass amnesia, especially on the issue of the environment. We’re told that environmental regulation negatively impacts business, and I have no doubt that this is true. The right thing is almost always more difficult and it usually requires more from us, than the wrong thing. The wrong thing is usually cheap and easy. Doing the right thing costs, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it work differently.

In Macbeth, Shakespeare reminds us that “sometimes, to win us to our harm, the instruments of darkness tell us truths.” Whatever truth there may be to cutting corners on controlling pollution, whatever truth their might be in the cost savings of doing the easy thing, there is the overarching question of the harm to which such truths ultimately win our species.

Jesus is again calling fishermen and disciples to his journey of truth-telling. I, for one, cannot tell him no.