Comprehension

I believe that when you comprehend something--you surround it with understanding. I mean to say, you can understand it from every perspective.

With this definition it's easy to say, there are many things we don't comprehend. Some of them are because we don't want to take the time. Mostly because we don't have the time. I guess there really are very few things in life that we really comprehend. I mean, I don't comprehend football, but any NFL player would (and most of the male population of the U.S.).

This is why it puzzles me when people insist that if they can't comprehend God, they won't believe in him.

If God is someone we could completely comprehend, then wouldn't that make him too small to be God?

And life itself, knowing that we have so many unanswered questions about life. Doesn't that alone teach us that life is more than we can comprehend? If that is the case, then why should we get so upset when something doesn't make sense?

This is all a very ethereal discussion so far.

I know someone who had a very horrible childhood because his mother was an alcoholic and his father was a paranoid schizophrenic. He grew up hard and had some very hard experiences as a result. When he got older he learned some good lessons from life and finally settled down and for awhile he was happy, then he too was attacked by mental illness. It has been one of the most unfair things I've ever seen.

Does that mean that God messed up? No. I think we live in a pretty messed up world. [That last statement was almost a tautology.] I know that I don't comprehend God (just understand bits and pieces about him), I know that there is more to this story than I can see. I also know that since we are eternal beings, what we see right now is such a tiny piece of our own stories that it hardly matters. Except that it really does matter for right now, and even if I do know that I live as an eternal being, it still sometimes hurts very deeply.

The thing is, you know that bad things happen to innocent people--and I'm not going to go into original sin and all because that doesn't answer the point. There are times when you just don't understand how these sorts of things can happen to people who don't really deserve them (when you compare them with some of the other folks running around--who seem to get off scot free).

I guess what I'm musing about it this: if we accept that God is bigger than we can comprehend, but the part we do know about him makes us understand that he loves us more than life itself. So when we have questions that are bigger than we can comprehend, we can give them to the God who is bigger than we can comprehend.

I guess that's faith.