#also pspsspsps dead dad club wya there must be some of us around here

[iscariotapologist]

I want to believe in God so badly it’s so hard.. why must we have faith? Why do you believe in God? your blog is great for my faith it helps thank you i downloaded Sefaria

hi beloved, i'm sorry you're struggling and honored that the blog helps you. the way i would answer this question depends on how you define faith i think. personally, i don't really think about "having faith" anymore. when i was young, because of the theological environment i grew up in, i had this idea of faith as some kind of magic spiritual key that would unlock god for you ("faith as a mustard seed" etc.) and i spent quite a bit of time trying very hard to do or feel it correctly even though that never made sense. these days i suppose i would say faith is an action and a choice, much like love, which is its root. it is almost more of a byproduct of my relationship with god than part of its foundation, although certainly there are things that are foundational for me which i choose to believe despite my doubts about them. faith is the word we use to describe hopes we act on, regarding god, and they are hopes because the nature of god does not lend itself to very many certainties, in the intellectual sense.

i believe in god because i cannot help it. i went through a stint of trying to be a very bad atheist for about a year after my father died (possibly shorter or longer, my memory from this time period is shoddy at best), which is to say i held god at arm's length and tried really hard to believe he wasn't there, which was difficult because literally every day he was bothering me. i was also 12-13 at this point which is not the easiest point of ones life at the best of times (and what is the angry not-atheism of a 12 year old anyway). after i gave up on that i went through a few other smaller crises (oh shit i'm queer/oh shit evolution is real/oh shit i think adventism is full of horseshit) and most recently The Great Spiritual Crisis of 2018-present (hence the blog) and throughout that time i've had periods of agnostic tendencies to various extents, phases where i didn't really talk to god at all, where i was terrified of god, etc. but i'm just not cut out to be an atheist or even super agnostic, although there are some things i'm pretty agnostic about. of course some people do great with those belief systems (or with being "religious but not spiritual") but god literally will not leave me alone so i'm not one of them.

i would invite you to consider that your desire for god is a reflection of god's desire for you. try not to try too hard....let god come to you, and allow yourself to be vulnerable enough to do so.