The Paper to End All Papers

All Hope students have to turn in a "lifeview paper" before graduating. This paper should outline how your lifeview has been shaped by your education. It is to serve as a sort of "watermark" of where you stood at graduation. I have three days left to finish mine, and writing it has been an englightening experience.

It is quite possibly the most intimidating prompt I've ever had to respond to.
Here is the assighment:
Your lifeview paper should address the following questions: Who am I? Why am I here? How do I fit? What is the problem here? What is the solution? What is my faith stance? Why is it this stance? How does it fit with other faith stances and how do they fit with mine?

woah.

So anyway, in writing this I'm learning a lot about myself and being forced to dig into what I believe and explain it. I thought it might be cool to share a few excerpts with you here.

The climax of my education unfolded on a busy street corner in Mumbai standing outside the Dhobi Ghats. A little girl of about eight or nine years approached me holding a baby of less than six months, putting the tips of her fingers together and tapping them against her mouth. The baby’s eyes had been gouged out. Her keeper’s clothes were torn, her hair was nappy, and dirt was smeared across her face. Both she and the child she held were emaciated and clearly malnourished. While I had been in the country less than a week, I had already been approached hundreds of times by children making this motion, and the sight of poor children begging had already become commonplace. But this girl was not commonplace. She was dying. Not the sort of dying we are all doing with every moment that passes, but active, painful, organs-shutting-down dying. Tears welled up in my eyes, and I stood dumbfounded as this realization knocked the wind out of me. A knot rose in my stomach and my world stopped.

It really did, simple as that. A worldview is a created thing, and the walls of my carefully created worldview came crashing to the ground as if crumbled by a sudden earthquake. The damage was devastating and complete. And there on the street, I cried. I cried at the unfairness of it all, at the lack of hope that reflected off of her eyes into mine. I cried because she was powerless to change her situation, yes, but also because for the first time in my memory so was I. I cried because if I gave her money or food they would be taken by her owner, a person who most likely had control of thirty or forty other orphans like herself.
I cried because what I actually gave her was a purple crayon, and because when I did she looked at me with confused eyes. Eyes that said, “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?”

As I cried on the street in Mumbai the words pounding through my head were: I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so so sorry.” I am not directly guilty. I am, however, sorry. I am filled with sadness, compassion, and empathy over the misfortune of another. This is the human heart. This is what makes poverty personal. How can I come to terms with the penetrating unfairness of the world? And how can I sleep at night knowing that in many ways my comfort comes at the price of someone else’s detriment?

The God that I had known (the one that protected myself and others from the tragedy of the world) vanished before my eyes, and in its place I was left with a God that did not make sense to me. I began to realize that the God to which I had unquestionably awarded my allegiance at a young age was a much more complex creature than I had previously created God to be. With the promise of Jeremiah 29:13 tucked securely in my pocket, (“You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart”) I set out to discover just who this mysterious creature was and what God was about.

Belief in God is sometimes looked down upon by intellectuals because it is illogical and God’s existence is, ultimately, improvable. But for me, belief in God is not the easy or comforting choice. I am a person of logic, who finds safety and comfort in explainable answers—concrete answers that make sense from every angle. But faith is messy and speculative and doubtful. These “big questions,” the questions of faith, bring me to my deepest vulnerabilities. I believe, as many do, that my faith today affects not only this life on earth but also my eternal fate. More than anything, this “faith vulnerability” makes me want to scream disrespectfully to my maker, “Look, if eternity is on the line, then we’re going to need some (f*#$ing) concrete answers down here!” With so much at stake, God’s mysterious and coy elusiveness is anything but charming.

So how did I find myself in the nonsensical religious camp? I don’t think it matters. Faith is a curious thing, and one way or another some of us wind up believing in God and some don’t. Despite all of my logical twistiness and confusing attempts to understand what God might be like, I feel deeply that my faith is not constructed by me. It is as if my faith already is, that it hums within me almost without my command or permission—a top that spins without having been set in motion. And here is the thought that is equally comforting and terrifying to me: perhaps my faith has been set in motion, but not by me. Perhaps it has been set in motion by God. It is mine, and it is both inside me and above me, but I did not create it.

That, my friends, that is a cool thought to think.