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Showing posts from March, 2010

The Ordinariness of Faith

I hit some traffic last Saturday. I don’t mean literally hit, but I do mean traffic. I was driving back from Barnes to Twickenham when suddenly the traffic ahead ground almost to a standstill. Seeing how long and slow moving the queue was, I took a leap of faith. I took a blind left turn and switched on the satnav. Without really knowing where I was going, I followed the satnav to Roehampton, where I hit another major jam. Fortunately on the satnav screen I noticed a side road heading towards Richmond Park. So I swung off-piste again and drove through the park, missing the traffic and enjoying an uninterrupted drive home. The leap of faith paid off.  How is it, I wonder, that some people can write off faith as some sort of mindless and mystical belief, and despise it as unreasonable? They reduce it to something ethereal and strange, and talk about ‘people of faith’ as though there is some other group of people who are not ‘of faith’. And yet we all exercise faith in very ordinary way