Power of Faith

 

In a few days Jimmy and I will be on our way to Turin, Italy to view the Shroud, and I’ve been thinking about the miraculous image on that cloth. I will share the experience of being in Turin during this rare exhibition next week in blogs and hope you’ll join us. We’ll be with Barry Schwortz, one of the world’s great experts on the Shroud, so I’ll pass along the latest information as we get it. As many of you may know, my early adult years were spent as an agnostic. I lived outside the fold–wanting to believe, but unable.  Faith itself is a gift that I had to come to the hard way–by reasoning, looking for facts. Even the will to believe cannot overcome doubt if you’re like me. Like Doubting Thomas, I needed proof, a rational foundation for belief.  Faith On Trial sets out the evidence I found, a powerful case for Truth. My journey took years, but my faith is consecreted now to Christ, unburdened by those doubts, or any further need to search.  

In First Corinthians, Chapter Twelve, the apostle Paul says that we’ve all been given different gifts and paths to faith — a word of wisdom, gifts of healing, faith. For me, this was how the process of moving toward belief began: Years ago I was afraid to fly. Then my husband, Jimmy, who used to fly a small plane, explained the aerodynamics of flying  in simple terms–At take off the plane builds up speed and the wings push down hard on the air to overcome the aircraft’s weight. Moving air flows like water, in currents, etc. But once I understood ‘why’ the plane could fly, my fear of flying disappeared. I understood the reasons. A skeptic’s search for belief (even unconscious) is similar–testing…always testing the facts and reasons.  

Don’t get me wrong. I do not believe that reasoning and facts are faith, nor are they a substitute for faith. The Shroud of Turin is evidence in a chain of proof. It is a gift because God forsaw the question. Evidence like this is merely soil for the seed of faith to grow in and flourish for those who live with doubt. Reason and facts work together to lead a skeptic to faith.  

In my search for faith, I found that Christianity has given us plenty of soil. Did you know that Christianity is the only world religion based upon knowable facts. It’s the only religion providing actual testimony of witnesses, corroborating evidence of their stories– scientific evidence, historical writings, even forensic evidence exists today to establish that Jesus lived, died, and rose from the dead two thousand years ago.  That’s the cornerstone of Christian belief, and that fact was and is the keystone of the bridge to faith for me as well.  

So imagine this: Today we have a cloth that appears to be the burial cloth of Jesus–the Shroud of Turin. Science has no explanation for the image on this cloth of a crucified man. The blood and wound images match the description of the wounds on Christ in the Gospels. The image is not painted, not created by any contact  or any other known process–there is simply no explanation for it. It is three dimensional. It was created eighteen centuries before the basic principles of photography were discovered, and yet it appears to be a negative image, as with photographs–not a positive image. The blood on the cloth marking the wounds described by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John is human blood. And circumstantial evidence places it in Jerusalem in the First Century.  Is it a picture of the resurrection preserved for us for these thousands of years?  

Is it the ultimate gift given to us in this time of great need? Check out my blogs next week – coming straight from Turin — for all the latest information!