Thoughts from another teacher on believing

I am reprinting this from a blog post I made several years ago...still compelling to me.

"...the God-life is not about believing all the right things about Jesus. It’s not about being able to recite the creed without crossing your fingers or believing that Jonah was swallowed by a big fish or having an instant, now-you’re-saved, “born again” experience. It is about being willing to let go of everything you think you know and allowing yourself to be drawn into the mystery that is God.
“Believing,” as John uses this word, does not refer to some intellectual process that happens in your head. To “believe” in something is to give your heart to it. The God-life then is about giving your heart to God. Your broken heart. Your disbelieving heart. Your divided, angry, fearful heart. Your hard heart. You do not, of course, have the power to transform your own heart, but you do have the power to offer it, no matter what condition it is in, to the God who is able to make all things new.
My wish, my hope, my most earnest prayer, is that church could be a place, the very place, the best place, for our children and our youth to bring their questions. And for us to bring ours. And then, as we wrestle with the questions of how we are to live and work and worship, as we grow in trust of God and each other—slowly, gradually, over our lifetimes—a new spaciousness would emerge allowing new things to be born in us and in the world.
“Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart,” wrote Ranier Maria Rilke,
and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. "
--credit given to The Rev. Deacon Eyleen