"Depth.............................."

While the temperature here in northern Kentucky has not dipped deeply enough thus far to require anything more than an occasional early morning warm-up from my furnace, rain has held us in its grip nearly every day this past week. My sinuses have had my mind “circling the runway”, thus far dissatisfied with all previous attempts to put something down on paper. Indeed, the scenario seems to me descriptive of the very word that continues to occupy my thoughts. Faith is a particular tenet of the Gospel that this old man has long considered greatly distorted by the Church. For whatever reason, I asked my Catholic friend, at school Monday, why he was so assured of his salvation; and, without blinking, he responded with nothing more than that one word. When our Wednesday Bible study got into a discussion concerning its definition, the teacher suggested such claim to be only as good as that into which it is invested. My own reasoning, however, declared even that truth leaving us flexible, each to their own theology, the infallible Book, filtered through men, becoming a mixed bag of opinions. People, after all, are just people. On my way home from school Tuesday, a sticker on the rear window of an SUV caught my attention: “God bless our soldiers,” it read, “especially our snipers!” Bill O’Reilly last night, arguing with an atheist, declared quite boldly that Christianity was not a religion, merely a philosophy followed by various denominations. Celebrity preachers are in abundance, each with their own following, their own version of “claiming the kingdom”. For me, “faith” has been a resurrected Reality who goes with me through the fog, His “hook in my belly” an anchor-line that secures me in my journey, my connection my correction, my one thing stable in a world where everything else seldom makes sense. In Him, I trust……