Without Faith We Become Ordinary

I am delighted to present you with yet another religious book. When I started off initially with the writing, I was uncertain of the direction I wanted to take-whether to sandwich more stories into the book, as in previous books, or simply to anchor the content of the chapters on purely scriptural themes that speak to life situations and challenges. Eventually, I settled for the latter option. This was due to the fact that although the biblical stories took place a long time ago, they still speak now, more than ever before, to our own life situations in the modern world. In dealing with the different themes, I made an extra effort to "crack open the seal" and provide insights into the possible meaning of specific passages. A few experiences from others and myself provided the arrowhead that guided and fortified the individual chapters. Obviously, suffering and pain are hard realities of life, and not many people have acquired the immunity that faith can offer to deal with such hard realities and the inevitable. Faith is a supernatural gift from God-one of the greatest gifts he gave to enable us to counter the influence and potency of evil. Instead of telling Peter that he had prayed for him that his faith might not fail, Jesus could have used his divine power to dismantle any kind of negative force or obstacle that stood in the way of Peter, the foremost apostle. But he did not, simply because when Jesus equipped Peter with the gift of faith, he gave him all the necessary tools and weapons of survival in an evil infested world. That gift of faith can be nourished and sustained through prayer. Initially, Peter depended on self-affirmation and personal strength to go the distance withJesus, even onto death, but that proved to be self-defeating and an overestimation of who he was. That hard reality stared Peter in the face because when he ventured out on his own, he failed-a contrast to when the 72 disciples ventured out in the name of Jesus and were victorious. In today's world, the major problem confronting believers is their lack of Faith. Many of us are even slipping back into the age of humanism or existentialism, where man is encouraged to outdo himself and become a "superman," to borrow from Frederick Nietzsche. The time is here to acknowledge our limitations as humans and turn to Jesus, the source of life and goodness. One author rightly pointed out that it is God who heals, and doctors who claim the fee. This does not necessarily mean that we should ask the doctors for a refund; however, we should not fail to acknowledge the true source of healing and miracles in our time.