@smilingheart1 That makes more sense. I wouldn’t think that a God like the Christian one would choose who He wants. I would expect it to be more the way you describe it. But the way @CaptainHarley put it made me wonder. But I know that there will be a different idea of this for ever Christian I talk to.
My point, though, is that I see this choice to have faith as a choice. It may feel like a gift, but it is a choice in that you allow yourself to have it. It is a gift in that you can allow yourself to have it, but it still, I believe, comes from inside, not outside.
When you make this choice, consciously or unconsciously, you have given yourself a gift that helps you cope in situations such as the one described by the OP. In having such an easily accessible coping mechanism, I think you are lucky. You can survive in such a situation because you can find what you need from within.
I cannot do that. I can imagine no circumstances under which I could access that kind of self-passification technique. I need the external support. And, like you, when I have needed it, it was there.
I nearly died from loneliness because I am bipolar and my brain takes things like that much more seriously than most people’s brains do. Everybody and their brother was telling me that I needed to find a way to fill that black pit inside me on my own. I couldn’t do it.
I could not do it. Not that way.
I needed to be shown I was lovable. I could not make myself believe it out of nothing. I needed evidence. I needed people to tell me they loved me. I needed women to tell me they loved me and so I went out and got them. Six or seven in as many months. It still wasn’t enough to make me feel good, but it was enough for me to start to believe that there was something worthwhile inside me.
It would have been a lot more convenient for all involved if I could have had a faith in God and could have learned what I learned without disrupting so many lived, not un-notably, the lives of my wife and children. These relationships were nearly completely virtual, but that both does not diminish their importance nor their threat to my stability. Good and bad.
But I am not so lucky as to have the gift of faith. I’m not sure I would want it if I had it, either. If I am right, and God is inside your head, then He can abandon you as easily as you found him. You can argue to yourself that He will never abandon you, but you only have what you feel and know inside your head. Nothing external. That is too slippery a slope for me to be willing to place a foot on. Give me solid evidence any day. I know I’m lovable now because enough people said it in black and white that it even got through my thick skull. Now my marriage is back to what it was when it was good. I truly believe that there is every likelihood that I would no longer exist if I had not learned I was lovable. My condition kills one in five of people who have it. That’s data.
Maybe faith could have given me the same thing. I’ll never know. I do think you are lucky to have faith, but I’m not sure how safe faith is. Maybe I’m just more cautious. I require proof for everything. I am not a risk taker. People who have faith seem to me to be risk junkies, in a way. They are willing to go all in in a great bluff—bluffing with their lives. I can’t do that. Yet I think people who can do it are lucky. Until the day they find they bet wrong. The day they need their faith and it is no longer there, disappeared as mysteriously as it arrived.
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