Do We Really Understand

What our Faith Stands For?

By Apolinario Villalobos

The fanatics who aver to be faithful Muslims, the ISIS group, kill people, as though they’re killing chickens. They look at themselves as Islamic messiahs. An elegant lady I know never misses Sunday Mass, but lets out a barrage of ear-splitting cuss as soon as she reaches home just because her housemaid forgot to water her favorite orchid. A Bible-toting house-to-house evangelist, a friend of my kumpare, never speaks to her neighbor, a single mom with three kids, just because the kids have different fathers. And, there’s another friend, a “faithful” born-again Christian who hosts weekly Bible reading in his home, but he never tires of finding faults in everything that his neighbors do, including the officials of the homeowners association of the exclusive subdivision where he lives.

The problem with man is that, he never makes God as the center of his life. For man, God is just among the “must do” in his list of activities. That is why, for the week, only one day, the one allotted for the worship finds man as seemingly “Godly”. And, for the rest of the week, he becomes ruthless in his ways, or to put it mildly, he gets off the track of goodness.

“Inconsistent” best describes man as regards his faith.  Such truth is some kind of a pill that is hard to swallow, as the saying goes, but even the pope, himself, Francis, admits to being inconsistent in his faith. No man is born a saint. He may be innocent as an infant, but as he grows, he becomes influenced by his surrounding, and that includes even his parents and siblings.

Man is vulnerable to temptation but such vulnerability should not be made as an excuse to deviate from the Right Way. True faith can be equated with our honest and sincere effort to make God as the center of our life. In other words, there should be a constant awareness of His presence all the time, everywhere. Everything that we do should be God-centered…regardless of our religion.

It is difficult to be consistently and sincerely faithful, but we can try our best, at least. On the other hand, those who do not believe in His existence,  should stop blaming Him for every misfortune that befall them.