The Reality of Faith

I recently read a quote that said a Christian is someone who lives in a three-dimensional world while everyone else lives in only two. When I thought about that quote, I thought it might be better said that we live in a four-dimensional world while everyone else lives in only three. After all, we pray to our Lord Who lives in a timeless dimension, we participate in a worship that transcends time and space in the Divine Liturgy, and we consider all of our actions in light of the final reality of our judgement. I'm sure it looks irrational to the "three-dimensional" world, but this other reality is ultimately everyone's reality. Like Abraham, we live by faith in the promised land, in the city built without hands - the heavenly city.

Another way of looking at it would be to imagine a world in which everyone was blind. If someone who was sighted came along and explained things to you from a sighted perspective or performed actions that seemed ridiculous or irrelevant to the way a blind person behaves and acts, we might consider such a person irrational. A way of explaining living by faith in an unseen reality could be something like this: As a blind person walks along a path, he will bump into a rock, a sighted person will walk around a rock, but a person of faith will cast the rock into the sea as our Lord has said.

We have many examples of what living by faith looks like in both the Scriptures and the lives of the Saints to know that this other world is in fact a reality.