Did you Stretch?

I was complaining the other day about some muscle soreness. A friend, much younger than I, asked whether I had taken a little time to stretch before "over-exerting" myself playing a couple of hours of basketball on our men's retreat...I think you know the answer. Today I have been studying some passages about belief. Faith requires us to be prepared to stretch. We stretch toward our initial belief and we continue to stretch in order to exert our faith. The fact that I stretched a lot in my twenties doesn't help my muscles now that I'm forty-six! Faith requires us to stretch beyond the current comfortable shape of our lives. This neglect is evident today. Many of the arguments that I hear against the basic tenets of belief take aim at this simple truth. For example, I hear belief in God questioned because God doesn't fit into a pre-constructed box. Typically, the box is constructed in such a way that it is a foregone conclusion that God doesn't exist. Presto! Science has proved that God doesn't exist. Genuine inquiry into the existence of God doesn't exclude rationality. Nor does it exclude metaphysical realities that are ill-shaped for a box. This Sunday I will take a journey into John 9. It's interesting to me that the nature of the disciples and the "Jews" and their perspective on the healing of a blind man reveal the same kind of belief struggles that are so common today. Why am I surprised by that?