How do I know God is real, Mummy?

At my daughter's bedtime the other night, she turned and asked me "How do we know God is real?"
I had to answer "We don't". I can not prove to her he is there, I can not show her he is there. There was no other answer to give. I went on though "That is why we have faith. Faith means we believe in something even though we can not prove it. That is why it is such a special relationship." She went on,  "How then do I know he is there?" .
"You do not know he is there, you believe he is there. You trust that he is there. That he is always there. He never leaves you, never changes, he just is."

I treasure these moments with my children. They are moments among the chaos that is my family life that remind me just how special our children are. They look to us to show them the way, but more importantly than anything else they trust us to show them the way. Trust comes so easily to a child, from the moment of birth they trust and depend on you to do all that they need. They grow up and slowly the cycle changes and they start to become the leaders and others start to trust in them. Sometimes along the line through this cycle of trust, is sometimes damaged. Trust becomes something we only give upon evidence that it will be upheld. We lose the innocence of unconditional trust. It is true that along our lives we receive bumps and bruises, the unconditional part of us becomes reticent, not just in trusting, but in love, hope and faith too. For example it is becoming more common for people to draw up a set of pre-nuptial agreements. Not only pre-empting the ending of this love, but also showing how little we have learned to trust. A relationship that should be based on love, trust and hope in the future, has already on paper ended all of those in advance.

Why do we become so cynical as we grow up? Why do we find it harder to accept what can not be written in black and white. When we become cynical, we become defensive, try to shut out all that might just hurt us. In doing so we shut out life.

Faith in God is a huge leap by modern faith standards. So little black and white proof and so much of it based on the fantastical and divine. If one can not totally trust the human standing opposite them ready to dedicate their lives to them, how can we expect them to believe that God is real. The task of convincing them that God is real, that faith and the Church are good things are hampered like much else by the Churches unreliability. The Church like, most other things is run by humans. Humans make mistakes, in doing so they damage the trust that is given to them. But the Church is still here because God's message is greater and better than us.

Finding faith, is hard. When you have a faith it is often because you have dug very deep inside yourself to find the confidence to take a leap. Yes the jump is a long way down, yes we may get hurt along the way but we decide to give it a good go. To find it we have to spend time listening to God's words, listening to God's actions in the world, spending time in the presence of the sacraments, spending time in prayer and discerning our own path through what is set out in front of us.

To have a faith centred life, we must have a God centred life. To find a way to a God centred life, we must have a prayer centred life. It is hard to fit it in, for many years prayer for me was grabbed in thoughts, wishes and thanks sent up to God as I tried to make sense of three small children. Now they are not so small and I have more time. My prayer life has more structure and I have more time to discern what is ahead of me. The one thing I do know though is if you have a faith in God, you learn how to trust again and when you learn how to trust, you have hope for the future both in our earthly lifetime and beyond.