At the beginning of my sophomore year in college, I felt overwhelmed with school right from the very start. I was forced to take biology, which had kicked my ass in high school, and I didn’t like the new professor I had. I was getting an introduction to philosophy, and I wondered if there was anything I could do to make it make sense. Additionally, I was living on this floor where I knew two people, and the rest of them were a bunch of guitar-playing, dining-hall-ruckus-causing freaks, and I wondered how I would ever get any work done with them shouting all of the time. Within the first week things went downhill, and I felt swamped by the work. Nothing in my life seemed to be going the way I had planned it just a week or two earlier when I was packing up to come back to school, and I didn’t know if I was going to make it or not. What if I came 1,200 miles away for college and then flunked out?

I walked out of the dorm one night into the warm breeze of late summer nights in Boston and lit a cigarette. It was about 10 p.m., I think, and everything was quiet, save a student here and there wandering around talking on the phone. I kept chewing over my troubles in my head, wondering how I would deal with the stress and the workload, not really knowing where I was going. Eventually, I came to the BU Beach (the urban campus’ version of a quad), and I looked up through the darkness, there shone a round stained glass window at the top of Marsh Chapel, fully lit up, with a picture of Jesus. I stopped walking and looked up at Him in the window for a moment, and as I looked, the anxiety I had felt and the stress that was eating away at me disappeared. I began to feel at peace with myself, my surroundings, and what lay ahead. I finished my cigarette and had a seat on a bench directly across the Beach where I could stare at the window for a while. Cars rushed by on Storrow Drive behind me, and I lit another cigarette and I leaned back in the bench and looked at Christ staring down from his throne, comforting me in the night. “Everything will be ok,” I said to myself, “No matter how bad it gets, He is with me at all times, and He has a plan for me.”

I sat there for a long time thinking and praying on that bench, and a sense of peace came over me that I had not felt in as long as I could remember. I knew that I would be able to handle whatever was thrown at me, and that Christ had a reason for all of the trials through which he put me. No matter how hard things were, I had to have faith that He would get me through. I realized that it would be impossible to know what God’s plan was for me at the time, but that in the end it will all explain itself. That was the first time since I began college that I began to regain the closeness to Christ that had faded in high school during a period of agnosticism that lasted for several years. That night I walked home with a sense of peace and contentment that I could trust in Him to guide me. I slept well for the first time in my new dorm, even though I got to bed late.

The next morning two planes flew into the World Trade Center. While I was clearly shaken and most likely in minor shock as we all came to understand throughout the day the magnitude of that event, I felt a sense of peace that everything, while different, would work out in the end. If I had not gotten that reassurance from Christ the night of September 10, I cannot imagine what my reaction would have been to the 9/11 attacks. That night He made gave me peace and love and support in my own life that helped me get through the next several months and helped me to rebuild my faith and love for Him.

This story is not meant as some sort of “proof” that God exists or that Christianity is the “right” religion. Far from it. I later learned enough from the philosophy classes that worried me so much that night that too many scholars and theologians much smarter than me have tried to do this over and over again and have failed. Evidence is not something I am looking for to shore up my faith in Christ. Evidence is something I look for as a manner of proving earthly things, such as evolution, which I examined in a Christian context on this blog’s predecessor more than a year and half ago. I don’t see a need to harp on belief of evolution, as there is little to be argued in sound science. And sound science is in no way anathema to Christianity. I just wish more people could see that.

As far as faith goes, that is a different matter entirely. Luckily, I don’t need “evidence” that God exists. I don’t need physical proof or a logic formula to help me settle on the conclusion that my faith in Christ is right. It is no wonder so much of the modern Western world looks at religion with such scorn when so much of our society is based on scientific reason. So much of the public bickering in our society that leads to the “noise” that clogs our media stems from not only a lack of understanding, but a lack of trying to understand. And, unfortunately, many of those servants of God that Christ’s words directly order to not judge, forgive, and love everyone often seem to miss that aspect of it while trying to spread Christ’s message of eternal life and forgiveness of sins.

This is not a pointing of fingers or laying of blame, because we need scientific reason and our society could stand to use it in more of the world’s practical matters than it already does. Too many things in our society are based on ill-defined ideology rather than on practicality. At the same time during, I do pray that those who have not yet come to know Christ’s love will experience the leap of faith necessary to feel it. (I do feel a need to point out that I am purposely not addressing the issue of doubt in this post. That would open up a whole other can of worms entirely, because for some ridiculous reason there are some who believe doubt plays no role in the life of someone who has faith. Nothing could be further from the truth, as doubt is as real as faith in anyone who has thoughts running through his or her head.)

Unlike everything else in our world, faith is different. Belief in God does not come from understanding God and His ways. Understanding God and His ways comes from believing in God.