Remember the games you played as a child? You sat there at the table, in your high chair. You covered your face with your hands and you said, "Mommy! Mommy! Where am I?" And you thought that if you couldn't see her, she couldn't see you. Your world was only as big as your senses. Your world was only as big as your experiences. What you see is what you get. And nothing more. And then, somewhere along the line you had to learn the truth. The world is bigger than our experiences.

The early Jewish Christians couldn't just cover their eyes and all of the problems of their faith would go away. They needed to know that there was something bigger to their lives than the doubts of perplexity and the mysteries of experience that pummeled them.

Life means more to us than our experiences. It has too. For the Jewish Christians, the meaning of their lives was bigger than the Temple, bigger than the sacrifices, bigger than a legal code. Faith, says the scriptures, is the certainty of what we do not see!

Ron Newhouse