One Small Reason I Need to Have Faith

 

The most recent Gallup Poll has the Congressional approval rating at 15%, approve, 80% disapprove, and 5% have no opinion. President Obama’s approval rating is just about 43%, which is pretty low for a President. Ironically, even though 80% of the people in the country disapprove of Congress right now, the vast majority of those running for re-election, will, in fact, be re-elected. People are not happy with their elected officials.

As a person who lives in a market with all Kentucky television stations we are being bombarded with ads from Alison Lundergan Grimes and Mitch McConnell, both of whom are running for Senator McConnell’s current seat. Fact checkers are having a field day with the television ads as virtually nothing that has appeared on television has thus far been even remotely true. The election will be won or lost on advertising and falsehoods. It makes me understand the 15% approval rating a little more. God bless us with our freedom of speech. I wish people would concentrate more on responsibility with their speech!

But these are the least of the issues facing the world right now. In Israel there is endless carnage in Gaza. In the Ukraine there is still carnage and the specter of a civilian plane shot down. Thousands of children are fleeing violence in Central America, coming to the United States and no one has a clue as to how to deal with this.

Then, of course, I go on Facebook and see all sorts of mean comments and articles. Sigh.

The world does not seem like a happy place any longer. I also recently read that people are 40% less empathetic than they were in the 1980’s. I’m not sure how one measures that, but that didn’t sound good to me.

It’s all rather depressing.

This is why I have faith in God and why I pray. Hope in the things of this world is, in a word, hopeless. When the Great Depression came about Herbert Hoover, who was an expert in disasters and was an incredibly good person, believed the goodness and compassion of people would rise up and people would help one another. People would share food and companies would hire as many people as they could even if profits had to go down for a while. He had great faith in human beings and his faith was crushed. He was often called heartless and blamed for people’s suffering and that was unfair. He cared deeply but found himself completely disillusioned with humanity.

The reason I love the Psalms is they remind us that the world is always a troubled place and cruelty exists; they also remind us that God hears us and listens to us and loves us through this. That’s why I have faith in God.