{"id":1156,"date":"2010-01-06T20:11:42","date_gmt":"2010-01-06T20:11:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/theirbadmother\/2010\/01\/my-year-of-believing-dangerously.html"},"modified":"2010-01-06T20:11:42","modified_gmt":"2010-01-06T20:11:42","slug":"my-year-of-believing-dangerously","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/theirbadmother\/2010\/01\/my-year-of-believing-dangerously.html","title":{"rendered":"My Year Of Believing Dangerously"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been struggling with faith this year<\/a>. I’ve been struggling with faith for a lot of years, but this year has been particularly complicated, with the death of my father figuring as the most complicated<\/a> – and painful – of complications. I feel like I need some spiritual grounding<\/a> now more than ever. For myself, and for my children<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I’m still ambivalent about how to do that. But just like with matters of health and fitness and personal ambition, sitting around ruminating on my ambivalence isn’t helping matters. So I’ve decided that I should do something about that ambivalence. Challenge it, test it, submit it to rigorous workouts. I’m doing that with my disinclination to exercise (hence the resolution to run the Tiarathon<\/a>, if I ever come out of this viral fog), why not do it with my spiritual malaise?<\/p>\n

My resolution: to devote time every week to exploring, seriously, ways and means of exercising my spiritual muscles, to challenging my ambivalence, to seeing if there is, perhaps, a religious practice that I can believe in – and, if not, if there is something else out there that meets my spiritual needs. I’ll read books and visit churches and talk to people. I’ll try<\/i>.<\/p>\n

And then I’ll try some more. And if I’m still ambivalent by the end of the year, well… I hope that I won’t be. I hope that I’ll have arrived somewhere, that I’ll have settled some questions for myself. Maybe that will mean finding God again, maybe it won’t. Whatever I find, though, I know that it will be good.<\/p>\n

As will the journey itself. That’s the whole point, really.
 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been struggling with faith this year. I’ve been struggling with faith for a lot of years, but this year has been particularly complicated, with the death of my father figuring as the most complicated – and painful – of complications. I feel like I need some spiritual grounding now more than ever. 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