Weird To Think

Weird to think that I'm so certain about my best friend going on mission.

We're only 18 and I have not spent even a breath of it on devotion to anything beyond my sensory perception, while she's spent each and every one of those years dedicating herself to the church and Jesus Christ.

In school we learned about ways of knowing. Of course we used most of them all of the time; where I prefered memory and emotion, she used reason and language but that's not to say that I don't use logic or she can't remember things. The only place our profficieny differed was faith, which makes a lot of sense. She was raised religious and there was only 1 paragraph for me to read about faith as a way of knowing in the curriculum material.

How could I use it if I was never taught how?

I'm just as uneducated in practicing faith as ever, I don't know how to turn belief or trust into faith, or how to find belief and trust in old books written and used by orginizations with so many major flaws. I've learned a little about how to believe in a higher power, something more abstract than God, illdefined but meeting techinical qualifications for descriptions such as "divine"; I still have no idea how anyone can believe in Jesus Christ, as their Lord and Savior no less.

Yet,

Yet, I know without a shred or shadow of doubt that mission is right for Sam: that shipping off to some unknown corner of the world for 18 months and not being allowed to talk to me 6 out of 7 days a week and living in a modern day version of hermitage for almost 2 years is the right choice for her now.

Yet, when the person I have talked to every. single. day. for. three. years. asked if I thought mission would be right for her at all, I said don't worry about graduating in 4 years, or the loans, or anything other than making sure you have cultivated the right skills and midset to have a successful mission.

Yet, when the most devout person I have ever known asked me, an atheiest and recovering "Fuck God And You For Believing In Him" enthusiast, if she should dedicate her entire life to God, Jesus Christ, and the Gospel (of a religion I will never join), I said yes. Yes, she should.

Why? How could I be so certain? How could I know? There are so many scary, terrible, miserable sounding, and intimidating things that go along with mission, why would I support her in it? Why would I encourage her to put me through something that will be so miserable for so long?

Her reasoning, and her faith, say that this was the Holy Ghost speaking through me, some form of divine intent. However, one of the few hills of conviction I will die on is that these bone deep certainties and intuitions are my own, they are from me and apart of me, but this knowledge didn't come from nowhere.

I believe in very little--- past lives, circular time, ressurection, heaven, the Holy Ghost--- but some part of me that exists beyond the here and now, that knows how to listen to the cosmos around me, and understands constants like time very differently than the rest of me knows how to believe. And if theres anything in this world worth believing in, its myself.