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First, "borne".
Heh, thanks. As you can tell, I've been trying to figure out the spelling. Should have opened up a dictionary . . .

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Second, please define how your faith has been borne out.
Through experience and observation. When following the precepts of Christianity as I understand them, God has proven faithful and worthy of trust.

One of the most immediate illustrations has been my wife’s physical battles. As you know from my rant before, it has been an immensely difficult time for us both. She is having her 14th surgery on Monday since we’ve been married, which will be 6 years on May 22nd. We’ve been through a lot with all of these medical problems, both physically and mentally. When I say God has given us both a supernatural endurance through this, I don’t mean that in any sense except for the miraculous. Have people managed through such things without God? Sure. Could we have? I seriously doubt it- at least not as well as we have.

In the past six years there have been numerous opportunities for resentment, anger, fear, depression, and many other things to hinder our marriage. I can tell you that personally there have been times of intense anger and frustration, especially when some of the rather extreme drugs have altered my wife’s behavior so she didn’t even seem like the woman I married. Left to my own logic or actions, in those times I’d have reacted far differently than I did. It was faith that led me to pray with my wife; it was faith that told me it was my job to serve her no matter what the cost to myself; it was faith that told her to trust my judgment for the hard decisions, even when she disagreed. And ultimately it was faith that said no matter what happened, we live under grace, are loved completely by God, and have an ultimate hope in Jesus Christ that one day the suffering of this world would fall away.

I realize that not being in my skin, there’s no way to really understand what this is and has been like. All I can say is, were it not for my faith I know my marriage would be in shambles right now, as would I. And this is but one example of MANY where my faith has proven to lead me to a life that is better than it ever could have been without.

Of course you can always say that my faith is just a placebo that produces results because it is the belief that is important, not the substance. All I can say is that there have been too many “right moments” and “coincidences” for me to believe it isn’t true. This, of course, is where Tony pops in to link to the skeptic’s dictionary about Confirmation Bias. True enough that you have to be cautious with experience, but in the end everything we believe is believed on the evidence of experience- even science and reason. I cannot think of anything that has been proven to me so completely as my faith in Jesus Christ.
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-Jeff
Rome did not create a great empire by having meetings; they did it by killing all those who opposed them.