Faith, Hope and Love (An Introduction)

"And now abide faith, hope, and love, these three, but the greatest of these is love." -- I Corinthians 13: 13 (NKJV)

A very good friend of mine who believes in God (more or less) but who has a decidedly strained relationship with Him, and much more so with the widely-diverged groups who pledge allegiance to Him, recently attended a wedding at which the above Bible verse was quoted, and it got her to thinking, which in turn got her to talking to me about it, which in turn got me wanting to clarify my personal views on all three: faith, hope, and love.

At least two of those things I was planning on blogging about anyway. Faith is something which I have found myself intently analyzing in particular over the past year or so (not that it was never in my mind before that; just that I found myself at odds with the ideal over the past year, and pondered my views on what faith was, and what it entailed). And Love is something that I've spent my entire life analyzing. I've long considered Love to be what life is all about, and the very center of what Christianity is supposed to stand for. Everything comes down to love. So both of those two topics are something I really want to talk about. The one that I didn't give as much thought to, the one that I think a lot of people neglect to give much thought to is Hope. And that's a shame because Hope is a pretty important component too.

All three are important, I believe, and each one builds upon the other. There's a progression between the three, from one to the other, though each is different, they also involve one another, and I believe that each is an essential part of - not JUST - a Christian life, but even for anyone who wants to feel (relatively) happy and/or fulfilled in life. So in the coming weeks, I intend to analyze each of these things individually, and then also as a whole, in my blogs. I'll begin with Faith, which is likely to be quite a doozy. So stay tuned...