Faith

Faith

 

Faith

With what amazing gift of wisdom do some mortals pronounce, ‘There is no God’?

Do they reference the singular advances of science to promote their minority position among the peoples of the world?

Do they not perceive the same exactitude of wonders these aging eyes and all my senses have gathered in through the seasons of orderly orbiting that glorious sun? Do they not see the meticulous gouging of the earth by a Master Builder to give us our oceans, our seas, our mountains, and our deserts? Do they within their honest faculties not see the preciseness of all creation and its Aeonian movement toward some realm of perfection? Do they truly believe ‘a big bang’ accounts for the detailed and methodical birth cycles of all life? Do they not feel the emotional and soulful rapture of love, the awe and wonder in the eyes and smiles of children, the heartbreak of loss, and the wonder of a new beginning?

We can doubt. We can scream at our Deity for the hurt and pain. We can at times almost give up on our Faith – when the evil forces in our world combine to torture us in awful ways. We know the dimensions of this world, the anger, the greed, the hate, the love, and we of faith hold course and believe in the promise of salvation and a destined purity. That faith comes from the records of history, from all the sacred documents, from the wise words recorded through time, from the most holy and honored man in our history, Jesus Christ. This man who lived among us is proclaimed the son of God. Some of us believe that. Some of us have doubts about that. Some are arrogant enough to laugh at those of us who believe and those who would believe.

While it may be true that we can easily portray ourselves as fools during our earth passage, we of Faith feel the stirrings in our souls when sadness comes, feel the elation and joy of love, and try to feel charity and kindness toward all those we encounter. We know we are not perfect and we know we need to pray for forgiveness and sustenance to our Higher Authority. It is of course not a tangible thing, this Faith, but It is what we have to see us through the rough patches of our lives. We prefer to accept the teachings of history and its sacred documents although denials are all around us.

We of Faith prefer our beliefs, our destiny, to that other offering of deep and utter blackness.

Many of the books I write are about crime and evil in our world. The plots and characters I develop are taken from people I have read about or seen along the way. For example, a young actress friend of mine was brutally murdered in Arizona. We, her friends, were stunned, our lives altered in some subliminal way, touched by the ugliness we had only read about or seen on our movie and television screens. Some years later my favorite uncle was murdered in a late night robbery as he was closing his service station in Knoxville, Tennessee…the ugliness would touch my family. Some few years later, my aunt, that favorite uncle’s sister, would commit suicide by jumping off the Gay Street Bridge in Knoxville. These events perhaps led me toward the genres in which I write, trying in my way to fathom the causes and effects of dark deeds in the hearts and minds of people.

Then, again, maybe a morbid fascination lays claim to a piece of me where I must visit the bleak and sordid affairs of humankind. When so much beauty can be found around my world, why must I write about the beast? Alas, it becomes not so much a mystery when I realize where I have been and where I hope and have Faith in the Kingdom to Which I go.

Am I an impostor in an imperfect world? I think not…just a man who has made bad and good choices in his living – keeping hold of his Faith.

Billy Ray Chitwood – May 1,2014

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My best wishes.