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Written by Gabrielle Guthrie for “See, there’s this thing called biology…~insanitybytes” @ https://insanitybytes2.wordpress.com/
Original post found @ https://insanitybytes2.wordpress.com/2025/01/04/belief-and-noticing/
Belief And Noticing
04SaturdayJan 2025
Posted by insanitybytes22
Tags beleif, blogging, culture, faith, insanitybytes22, noticing, opinion
I think “believe” is totally the wrong word to be using in faith. “Believe” is like an act of will where one makes a resolution about what one thinks. After having been on the internet for a while where many people make a habit of demanding to know what you believe, the word has just left a bad taste in my mouth. Add in the fact that people can be really fickle so our vows about “what we believe” can be about as reliable as New Year’s Resolutions.
And of course, the world is plumb full of people who believe completely nutty things. Belief is not what makes something true real or valid.
We don’t “believe” in our faith. We notice. We observe. We knock. We seek. We go looking for Jesus and He reveals Himself to us.
Sometimes He goes looking for us and we notice and respond.
Belief is “an acceptance that something exists,” one problem being the Bible tells us “even the demons believe.” So, belief is not really a great standard. Some people insist on believing that God does not exist, yet another belief that really has no meaning in the grand scheme of things.
I grow weary of people always telling me what they “believe” and then trying to convince me they are right, and I better believe what they do. I’m curious about what people think and believe, but ultimately it has no meaning. Who cares that you believe pineapple doesn’t belong on pizza? The level of strident vehemence invested in our own beliefs can be a bit weird and out of proportion.
Sadly, people can also “believe” and yet never notice, never observe, never receive what is evident all around them. In that way “believing” can be a disability because one falsely thinks that’s all there is to it. You can just proclaim it to be true, believe it, and then squeeze your eyes shut and plug your ears. Needless to say, if one has to close their eyes and plug their ears it calls into question how much one trusts and believes their own beliefs.
So on the 4th day of the New Year, I’m dumping the word “believe” and exchanging it for “noticing.” I notice a lot of Divine things. Nature, miracles, the sunrise. This morning the Lord saw fit to put a beautiful smiley face sunshine across my backyard…. in the pitch dark. It was a bit amusing because I had to go out and check it out to see what in the world was causing that. Turns out a porch light had fallen off the neighbor’s back porch and was now shining through a flattened ball on top of their garbage can, all of which lined up perfectly with a broken board in my fence and created this really neat projection across my entire backyard.
Our job is to go around “noticing.” The Bible says in Romans 1:20-21, “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.”
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