Logic Versus Faith Testimony

A Thinker with Faith

One of the best ways to introduce my life and my pursuits is to discuss a test I took in my early thirties. It was a spiritual gifts test made up of two parts. Part one was for personality and it included four options. The second part had sixteen options related to spiritual giftings. Combined, these 4 personalities and 16 giftings could produce 64 different combinations. Before taking the test, the instructions mentioned that a thinker with the gift of faith was the rarest of those sixty-four possibilities.

It came as no surprise to me to be labeled as a thinker. I have taken other such tests and was labeled the beaver, thinker, mastermind, or whatever represented that category. This certainly does describe me as I am always wondering how and why and trying to make patterns out of events.

What did surprise me was being told my strongest gift was faith. Perhaps it should not have, as at that point in life I was already trying to follow what I received in prayer ... but to myself, it always felt like my faith was weaker than it should be and that my logic was always fighting my faith.

After receiving these descriptions, I began examining my life from a different perspective and realized that these two forces had always been there. Either one or the other would be taking the lead for a period of time. For the first twenty-five years of my life I would say logic won the vast majority of the time. Then, for the next twenty-five years of my life faith became more prominent ... but not by much. It was a struggle between the flesh and the spirit. There was a desire to have that simple faithfulness of a child yet the yearning to understand everything before obeying even simple commands.

My years of doing photography, almost to the point of obsession, were driven by the desire to learn and experience what life was about, especially during the first half of my twenties. The later half was when I was becoming more faithful, and my photography took on a more symbolic and abstract appearance as I began exploring deeper themes that could not be recorded directly. Yet, somehow, photography was still my artistic tool in this battle between logic and faith.

Still later, even my work in the field of Creation Science bore this battle out. I did not want to try and prove what I was supposed to have faith in, but while battling to defend the Genesis account of creation, there was certainly many personal questions being taken care of after having been raised in a secular society and having been taught evolution. The drive was as personal as it was trying to do something for the Kingdom of Heaven.

Through the years, this battle has calmed down a little. Traveling back and forth across the United States while doing creation research put me in many positions where faith was needed. Although I have occasionally had to wait longer than expected, I have not been disappointed. While I still have a desire to know things, I have come to realize that knowledge is of the urgent and sometimes of the prideful while faith is of the important and often humble.

After fifty years of this battle, one benefit I now have that not many seem to find is that both my faith and logic point in the same direction. I have a Creator. I have a Savior. Righteousness is the measure of all things physical and spiritual. I want to resist evil and restore what the enemy has stolen. It would be difficult to not have these concepts because both faith in the spiritual and understanding of the physical point to those same conclusions.

Believers sometimes wonder how the Israelites could doubt and complain when they entered the wilderness after witnessing the miracles that brought them out of Egypt. I think I would fare no better than they. After decades, the battle between faith and logic continues on for me. In an odd way, each time a person wants to grow or reach for a higher level, it requires more faith than they currently have. It is a never-ending battle of spirit and flesh ... or at least so it seems for me. Traveling the wilderness takes a different faith than leaving Egypt.

The first part of this book is filled with my background, childhood, and young adulthood. Therefore it expresses a lot of searching, logic, and philosophy. The next part of the book starts dealing with faith and the many adventures that narrow little path has taken me through. Perhaps, before my story finishes, I will learn to balance logic and faith and let them work together as a strong team.

This page is under construction. My apologies for any misspellings, repeated text, missing references, etc. Please visit again later for a more complete treatment of this topic.