Chess and Faith

Maybe what we need most is not the answers to all our questions -- we need a reason to hold on when we don’t have the answers, or don’t understand the answers we have. It’s like chess – sometimes it’s wisest to counter-move instead of to defend. In chess, if you only defend, the offensive player will eventually get the better of you. You will lose the game. (At least, that was my experience). To win, you must do both: defend and counter-move.

Likewise, if you try to find the answer for every spiritual question before continuing forward, you will fail to find all the answers you seek because you will not be in the place you need to be to receive them. It’s not that you shouldn’t have questions, or that there aren’t answers, it’s just that you will likely run into a time when your faith will be tested – and it will be tested in the hardest way possible. For people of analytical integrity, who question in order to learn deeply, who test their own assumptions, who would rather be right than comfortable -- that is likely to come in a way that tests this very quality – which is both strength and weakness.

It takes great humility to say, “Everything I once believed in could be wrong.” In a way, however, it will take greater humility, to say, “There may be truth that goes beyond my comprehension, beyond all my learning, all my logic, all my study. But to find it, and to find peace, I must trust in something beyond my own abilities.”
I do not have this challenge: the challenge of questioning and believing. I still have to search for light – but not in the world around me. There, I recognize light from dark. Mostly I search to separate the light from the darkness in my own heart. But I know that we are all tested in the way that pulls at our very heart-strings, forcing our greatest strengths and our greatest weaknesses (often the same characteristic) to the foreground for purification and submission to God’s will. When Satan tempted the Savior, his greatest temptation was not with the promises of bread or power, to test the Savior’s weakness – the greatest temptation was to challenge the Savior’s strength…his divinity. "If thou be the son of God…"