A big chunk of my day everyday is eaten up by reading. Either my nose is hidden behind graduate school books, tucked into literature for study for classes I'm teaching or preparing, or digesting really important periodicals like Sports Illustrated.

Fortunately, every now and then I will read a paragraph that is so bold, so poetic, so profound and so refreshing that it stops me in my tracks. I found one of those paragraphs in Barbara Brown Taylor's, The Preaching Life.

She writes...

"To believe that (that God wants to have a relationship with us) is an act of faith--not a one-time decision, but a daily and sometimes hourly choice to act as if that were true in spite of all evidence to the contrary. Sometimes it feels like pure make-believe. I read the weekend newspaper, full of stories about violence, addiction, corruption, disaster, and I wonder whom I kidding. Or my own life begins to spring leaks and I lie awake in the middle of the night faint with fear. I want a safer world, I want a more competent God. Then I remember that God's power is not a controlling but a redeeming power--the power to raise the dead, including those who are destroying themselves--and the red blood of belief begins to return to my veins. I have faith. I lose faith. I find faith again, or faith finds me, but throughout it all I am grasped by the possibility that it is all true:I am in good hands; love girds the universe; God will have the last word."