A faith analogy

One of the essential elements of life is potable water. If you read my post from a couple months ago about the process of getting potable water at my house then you know that it is not as simple as just turning on the tap.

On the Kara/Kerewe survey a couple weeks ago we brought along a portable Katadyn filter so that we wouldn't have to spend money on bottled water. While I drink Katadyn filtered water on a daily basis, I hadn't ever used a portable one and it gave me a bit of an insight regarding how faith works.

The first couple of nights the water looked like this before being filtered:

It wasn't hard for me to feel confident that this water, going through the Katadyn, would come out clean and free of disease. The water looked pretty clean already, I just had to have faith that the Katadyn would do its job, and it wasn't hard to have faith for that.

When what we can perceive with our five senses doesn't contradict what we know about God, it is easy to have faith.

Now, due to having a dark nalgene (covered in stickers), once the water was in the bottle, I couldn't really see the quality of the water. So, when the water started looking like this (before being filtered)...

...its safe to say that my faith in the Katadyn was tested. This is a trusted product that I have used for years and it has a reputation worldwide for filtering water...but how much did I really trust it? What I was seeing (and smelling) made me question my faith in the Katadyn and I couldn't simply look at the final product before drinking it to ensure that it at least looked clean. I had to drink in faith, trusting that the faithful Katadyn had done its job. I could decide to run out and spend money on bottled water, or I could step out, in faith, and drink the filtered water, trusting in what I know about Katadyn, having faith that despite what my senses were telling me, it was safe to drink the water.

I drank the filtered water and I'm not sick! So, my faith in Katadyn was proven to be well placed, but my faith couldn't have been proven had I not stepped out and drunk the water first.

Maybe this will challenge your faith as it has mine:
In what ways am I relying on my five sense and having more faith in them than I do in God?
Do I really only have faith in God when my senses agree with my faith, or does that faith still hold just as strong when everything tells me to question it or doubt it?
Are there times that I need to be stepping out in more faith despite what reason, logic and worldly wisdom are telling me?

Stay tuned for the answers, they may come up in future blog posts, we'll see.

For faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. (Hebrews 11:1 NASB)

My Normal: Drinking Water

I mentioned a couple of times in recent blog posts that I was happy to return to “my normal”. I think I should elaborate on what “my normal” actually is. There are so many things about my life here that are quite different from American life. By taking time to write about these things you’ll be able to get a better picture of my day-to-day life.

An added bonus is that I will have to look at my life through the lens of what is unique and special about it. I think everyone has a unique and special life in one way or another, but we often forget to see those things. What we see as normal or mundane in our own lives can, from the outside, seem exciting and wonderful.

So, here starts a series of blog posts about my normal, mundane, exciting and wonderful life.

Lets start with basics: drinkable water.

The water that comes out of the tap is not drinkable. Actually, technically I guess it is drinkable if I didn’t mind getting any number of stomach issues. I don’t, however, want stomach issues.

In order to get drinkable water there are a few things I must do.

Fill a bucket with tap water.

The black bucket = bad water.

Dump the black bucket of water into a BioSand filter. This filter is first filled with large rocks, then smaller and smaller rocks then topped off with sand. As the water moves through the sand, and the biofilm created by the sand, pathogens and solids are filtered out of the water.

The blue bucket = good-ish water.

The sand filtered water can be drunk, theoretically. I haven’t worked up the guts to just drink the sand filtered water straight, and since I have another filtration method in the house, just to be safe, I send the water through that as well.

Pictured below is my Katadyn filter. The blue-bucket water gets poured into the top and comes out the bottom drinkable. We fill up bottles with the water and set it to the side so that we always have lots of drinkable water ready to be used.

The three tubes inside the top portion are called candles. (When I first heard that term I was confused about how a flame could stay lit inside a plastic cylinder with water being poured over it…but then I figured out that candle doesn’t always mean a wick and flame.)

Anyway, the water gets filtered through these candles and comes out completely safe and ready to be drunk!

And that is my normal drinking water process.