The evidence we seek

Everywhere we look, signs of spring surround us. From my office window I can watch as ragdoll lambs in the fields gambol clumsily around their mothers. The sun is rising earlier and lingers longer. A little cherry blossom still clings on after last week’s unexpected winds. And the warm yellows of daffodils dot the greening fields.

This is all very familiar. None of it is a surprise. Indeed a local farmer friend tells me he can predict the day when the swallows will appear – swooping around his barns and between his buildings, as if they never left. I realise that I too worry if I have not heard ‘our’ cuckoo by the third week of April.

So potent is this expectation of spring that it brings its own comfort through the long nights and short days of winter. When the frost is hard and the trees are bare, long before we feel the warming fingers of sunshine, we know what is coming. We have confidence in the changing of the seasons and the turning of that great wheel of life.

Still more, we mark their beginnings and ends. We plant on the evidence of previous harvests. We invest in hope of a return.

It is a puzzle then that we consider faith – that “substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen” – in such a different way.

Should we declare faith unreasonable then; that the evidence of an ordered creation, strangely offers no evidence of an ordering Creator? Or can we acknowledge faith in others - the lucky or the weak - but resist it or declare it elusive for ourselves? Or perhaps we find ourselves quietly hoping and questioning, like the man who cried out on meeting Jesus, “I believe! Help me in my unbelief!”

The search for evidence will be familiar to every post graduate research student. And yet we persist with our work in the hope of finding what it is we hope for.

So, in this season of new life – and the era shaped by Christ's empty tomb – dare we believe?