February 11

As Bonhoeffer says, “We ought to find God not in our moments of need and failure, but amid the fullness of earthly life; only in this way could it be shown that God is not an escape, constructed by necessity, which becomes more and more superfluous as the limits of our powers expand.” God is the higher power we must strive to have a constant, dynamic relationship with throughout our lives as we grow in faith and experience. We, as humans, have a desire for purpose and meaning in our lives just by questioning why and how the world around us exists, and God fulfills this want. We “yearn for the unbounded” because we are limited and not satisfied in self-sufficiency and want to believe in something greater that is outside of ourselves. The belief in a God also comes from man’s feelings of loneliness that nothing in the world can quell like the comforting idea of a God can. Without belief in a God, the world can seem hopeless, dark, and lonely. Humans crave a higher purpose and an explanation for the everyday occurrences and phenomena around us. God presents hope for the future and a moral incentive in the present to keep us peacefully coexisting. We simultaneously fear and praise Him because we will never fully understand the vast majority of concepts that lie around believing in Him, like the idea of the Holy Trinity. When we profess our faith, we make an existential decision along others in our faith community. Since he is God the father, he is not the God of any one place, but the God of the people, and “he is therefore not bound to one spot but is present and powerful wherever man is.” God is present wherever man allows him to be.