So, take a few steps down the perilous path. Explore what you believe, what you see, and consider what makes sense of the world. Ask questions. Never stop asking questions. And don’t trust anyone who wants you to stop. The truth does not need a defender. It is the essence of reality and the foundation of the world itself. It’s far beyond you or me to define. Ask for it. Seek for it. Knock on every door.

When I saw some growing in the walled yard, I stopped and said, “How did you get here?” Literally, I talked out loud to the flowers. I was just so shocked to find them in that place, amidst so much chaos and neglect.

Belief is like this. When we really believe in something, we trust in it to guide our lives and help us make decisions. Like I mentioned in an earlier post, if we believe that peanut butter is disgusting, we might not like pad Thai. Because beliefs aren’t always based on an overwhelming amount of evidence, though, they sometimes disappoint us. Like a wicker chair that has seen better days, we sometimes trust our beliefs to guide us and they collapse underneath the weight of our life. Perhaps you believed that brussel sprouts were gross only to discover they were delicious or the much worse belief that someone was honorable only to find out that they were a liar. Either way, we live what we believe and, therefore, beliefs have consequences.

Are you aware that you can hear, understand, and entertain ideas without them having to become part of your worldview? You can truly understand what someone else is saying and still disagree with them. You can imagine where they are coming from and why they drew the conclusions that they drew or made the decisions that they made without validating their position. It’s not dangerous to hear ideas and worldviews different from your own, it’s empathetic.

But is it really “make” believe? Aren’t children reminding us of the importance of belief? Even if their belief is in something made up like Santa Claus, that skill, learning to believe, is critical. I think we all learn to believe and imagine when we are children. So, maybe we don’t need to spend our time thinking about when we learned to believe, but, rather, when we learned to stop believing.

But, alas, we let our loyalties, just like all our other affections, run about unchecked, unrefined, unexamined and we harm ourselves and everyone around us in one way or another.

Whether you have any experience with Christianity or not is irrelevant to my point. It’s the context and framework that I think is most helpful because I believe that what you think about Jesus is the most important thing about you. My point here is that, even if you learn the same stories or same sorts of things, how you learn them matters. How you learn your beliefs is going to shape how you view them, how deeply rooted they are, and whether or not you hold onto them when things get tough.

Deep down, we want our friends to be trustworthy, honest, authentic, and to stand by us no matter what. In a word, loyal. But before we can leave this conversation and move onto something different, I think we need to do the really important work of asking ourselves what we mean and don’t mean by “loyal”. What are the pitfalls? Where do our unrealistic expectations hide? And, are we even loyal ourselves? Can we, rationally, even expect this of others? What do we really want when we say we want a loyal friend?

Too often, we place our identity not only in what we believe (which is actually a good thing), but also in who taught us this belief. Read that again: we place our identity not only in what we believe, but also in who taught us this belief. And that, friends, is incredibly dangerous.

What do we mean when we talk about “background noise”? I’ll tell you what I think we mean. I think we mean that we cannot sit in silence because it scares us. We’re not used to it and we don’t know what will happen if we have to consider the beauty of bird song or the beating of our own heart. Much less, the sounds of our own thoughts and the inner workings of our souls. No, we’d better not go there. Too messy. Too risky. We’re too afraid of what we might find. No matter that it’s likely buried treasure and the secret to all that’s good and glorious.