While with a group of friends today we were talking about faith. Discussing it and questioning what our understanding of it is.
One comment made about one way to look at faith was
If you’re sat on a chair, you hold faith that THAT chair is fit for purpose and will keep you sat safely and not break.
This made me think, as someone who has far too many questions about ‘religious faiths’ to have one of my own I thought of it a different way.
What (or who) do I have faith in and trust?
And when put like this I have just one answer
My Guide Dog Fizz.
I have total faith in her (and Vicky before her)
Each day i put on her harness and trust her to guide me to my destination; be that getting the kids to school or wherever we may be going to.
I give her the directions and instruct her on where we are going, but I have faith in her that she will get me there safely, not walking into traffic or causing me to trip or fall on steps, curbs or other surfaces.
And with the exception of the odd over-hanging branch I know she has me.
My faith in her is I guess some would say, similar to that faith of a religion. I have trust that she will protect me, keep me safe.
I know HOW she is trained and WHY she is trained, but no-one can say for certain WHY she takes that training and guides me each day.
That to me is faith.
I have the faith that she will do as I ask of her each and every time I put her harness on.
I trust her.
I can’t see what she does each time we go out together; I simply feel how she moves through her harness and I can react accordingly following her lead.
That to me is faith.
I trust her.
I may have totally missed the point of the discussion; I have never sat on a chair and though ‘this isn’t fit for purpose’.
Just as I have faith that a chair will be safe to sit on; after all this is what it is designed for. I have faith in my guide dog, because she has been trained to guide me.
To me that is faith.
I don’t think you missed the point at all. I think you are spot on. But I’m guessing that when you first met Fizz you didn’t have the same faith in her which you have today. You knew she was trained and was told what she could do, but you had to get to know each other and the first time she took you across the road was a huge step of faith for you.
This is a great comparison to faith in Jesus. The first baby step is based on head knowledge; evidence you have examined and concluded He is who He says he is. As you step out in faith your experience of Him leads you to trust Him and from that heart knowledge, faith grows.
If you blindfolded me and told Fizz to take me across a busy road, I’d be terrified. I have no experience of Fizz leading me and no learnt faith in his ability to do so. In the Bible, Hebrews 11 verse 1 says, ‘Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see’. Hope in the Christian sense is not wishful thinking but a ‘longing for’ which is based on our experience of God. Just like you don’t just hope Fizz will get you safely across the road but trust her to do it because she has done so many times before.
Thank you for posting this thought provoking comparison.
It did take time to learn to work with Fizz and trust her. In a way it was actually harder to train with her than I found training with my first guide dog (Vicky) because I had got used to doing things the way Vicky did them and Fizz was different. Yes both dogs were trained the same, but their personalities and the way they worked was different, where as with my first dog I had no comparisons (and this is when I discovered how Vicky’s Stubborn ‘Retriever-isms’ had meant she had me wrapped around her paws!
First with Vicky and now with Fizz it is a continual learning, every day I am learning from her and she from me, even all these years later. Another similarity to faith in Jesus.