Quest for Faith

By Ann Wright

Quest for Faith is the authors personal journey to understand not only her own faith, but the impact of faith on society. understanding God, Jesus, the Bible, and how we all use them in our daily lives is a challenge. Our beliefs affect how we perceive other people and how they perceive us; but the daily tedium of life may distract us from this most important goal of our existence. Quest for Faith is the first step on the most compelling journey of Anns life, a quest to seek God; a quest to strengthen her relationship with God.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Apr 19, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462008971

Book preview

FAITH

Faith is willingness to accept and treasure

Concepts that the mind can never measure.

Faith is believing without seeing,

But using sight to strengthen our believing.

Faith is not blind when facts are known,

But knows that we don’t live by facts alone.

This hopefulness called faith within us thrives

Not needing rhyme or reason to survive.

Faith is when our hope becomes conviction

That we can accept without restriction.

Faith takes a path no one has trod

But uses life’s experience to seek God.

* * *

GOD

Although each culture has its god(s),

To me they’re all the same –

Humanity’s quest for good –

Regardless of the name.

Around us is the living proof.

Such order and design

Throughout the universe is seen,

Each factor well-defined.

No freakish accident could cause

Such sweeping harmony.

There has to be a guiding light

Although we may not see.

This force gave each of us a gift –

The mind to comprehend

An abstract deity although

It lies beyond our ken.

And yet this self-same mind betrays

Our God’s reality.

Blinded by our world’s confines,

Obscurely do we see.

Imperfect in this perfect world,

Humanlike, we guess

At God’s true purpose for our kind.

Why were we so blessed?

I think each one of us sees God

Blurred by experience;

And yet we have the faith to build

A boundless confidence.

Confidence that God exists

Beyond our little earth.

Confidence that we will learn

The meaning of our worth.

And so through worship and our prayer

We seek to communicate

With our omnipresent God.

We seek to shape our fate.

A fate that only God defines

But gives us each free option.

Our final fate, though planned by God,

Is our own adoption.

* * *

WILL THE REAL GOD PLEASE STAND UP?

When my final breath is loosed, which God will I see?

God of love? Or God of wrath? Which one will it be?

The oldest verse portrays a God of jealousy and ire,

Whose fury chastened feeble man with water and with fire.

A God who tested faith and love, demanded sacrifice

Of earthly things that we loved most. No less would suffice.

The wrathful God tested Job, I hear a goodly man;

And Moses for a broken stone denied the Holy Land.

What anguish did Abram feel when told to kill his son?

Though the order was repealed, the hurt had still been done.

But God did not excuse himself from feeling kindred pain

When His Son pleaded for his life, pleaded – but in vain.

The loving God, despite his rage, still gave a second chance

To His creation, feeble man. It was not happenstance

That Eve and Adam bore a progeny that still survives.

Defiant disobedience did not cost them their lives.

Throughout the Book, His mercy shows to king and slave the same.

It was the heart He valued most, not power or the name.

So here am I. What am I to think about this God?

To my mortal mind, His actions seem at best quite odd.

At their worst, they seem capricious, fraught with frailty.

Yet I wonder could the pens of writers just like me

Bring interpretation to the facts they heard and saw,

Creating but a history instead of divine law?

Immutable God? Or does He change, adapting just as we?

Learning, growing, reacting to creation’s mysteries.

If we are in His image, then is He not in ours?

Emotion’s bonds constraining thought but not constraining power?

Or is it our emotion that limits what we