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On belief
Last week, I saw the following on a church sign board: "When we put our cares in God's hands, he puts his peace in our hearts." This reminded me in some ways of self-help programs like Alcoholics Anonymous and their twelve-step program, where the first three steps are "admitting" that the person is powerless with regards to his/her addiction and then believing that a power greater than ourselves can help us and then turning our will and lives over to the care of that higher power. There are differences between the two, but they share the sense that God can, in some ways, take care of our problems for us. The 12-step program makes it clear that it still takes effort on our own part, while the church sign sounds a bit more passive.
Now if you've been reading my blog long, then you know that I don't put much faith in there being a God to help us out. Still, I think there's some wisdom buried here. In the first place, it's not healthy or helpful for us to worry beyond a certain point. Constructive worry can help us think ahead and think about things to solve or avoid problems, but beyond that point it can be very detrimental to our health and well-being. Belief in God can make it easier to stop worrying as we convince ourselves that some higher power is watching out for us and as long as the believer doesn't completely disregard helping himself/herself, then putting "our cares in God's hands" can be very helpful even if there's not actually any divine hands coming down to take our cares.
A passage in Lance Armstrong's It's Not About the Bike helped to clarify all this in my head. He'd always been uncomfortable with organized religion and not terribly certain about God's existence or the efficacy of prayers. He writes:
But I knew this much: I believed in belief, for its own shining sake. To believe in the face of utter hopelessness, every article of evidence to the contrary, to ignore apparent catastrophe--what other choice was there? We do it every day, I realized. We are so much stronger than we imagine, and belief is one of the most valiant and long-lived human characteristics. To believe, when all along we humans know that nothing can cure the briefness of this life, that there is no remedy for our basic mortality, that is a form of bravery.
...
Without belief, we would be left with nothing but an overwhelming doom, every single day. And it will beat you. I didn't fully see, until the cancer, how we fight every day against the creeping negatives of the world, how we struggle daily against the slow lapping of cynicism. Dispiritedness and disappointment, these were the real perils of life, not some sudden illness or cataclysmic millennuim doomsday. I knew now why people fear cancer: because it is a slow and inevitable death, it is the very definition of cynicism and loss of spirit.
So, I believed.
He's not believing in God here or even a power higher than himself (unless that power is simply hope or something like that). He's believing in himself. Even while acknowledging, as he does elsewhere, that strong, confident, hopeful people can die and people who seem weak and even dispirited can make it, but he recognizes that, all other things being equal, one is better off with "belief," with hope, with confidence than the alternative. As he suggests, we do this every day, and it's easy when things are going well. It's when life becomes difficult, though, that it's most important to find that, to avoid or minimize worry and find belief, hope and confidence, even if it's just the belief in the power of belief, hope in the power of hope, and confidence in the power of confidence.