August 1 - Do You Believe?

We start off this month cheering on Canada at the 2024 Summer Olympics. I’m a big sports enthusiast and love watching the best athletes compete for their home nations. I remember being particularly inspired when we hosted the 2010 Winter Olympics here in Vancouver, with our catchy theme song, “I Believe”! We heard it every day on TV ads followed by the question: “do you believe”?  The focus of this collective faith was to win gold at home and if we answered “yes” to those commercials, we thought we could actually make that happen. Well, Canada did win gold, a record number of times that year, but the truth is, Canada won those medals, not because we wished for it, but because our athletes trained for hours every day.

What we choose to believe is critical to our future.  Contrary to popular opinion, truth is not relative.  There is no “my truth” or “your truth”, only “the truth.” Believing the earth is flat, no matter how passionate you are, will not change the shape of our very spherical planet. Truth is not based on what we believe; however, what we believe should be based on absolute truth.

The opening scenes of the “I Believe” video featured one man skating across a beautiful frozen lake and another man standing atop a spectacular snow-capped mountain ridge.  The bigger question than “how well can I skate this lake?” or “ski down this mountain?” is “how did this incredible mountain and lake get here in the first place?”  Or better yet, we should be asking “what on earth am I doing here?”  The answers to those questions give us a reason for getting up every morning, and an important clue to our ultimate destiny.

The lyrics to “I Believe” set the backdrop for these questions.  The song starts off with the challenge of being alone and overwhelmed, but ends with the hope that we will make it because of “the power of you and I.”  As heartwarming as that sounded, it’s not enough.  Our world is too big, too beyond any of us to navigate by simply using the buddy system.  We need help from the Designer, maybe an actual instruction manual, ideally some personal mentorship from somebody bigger than you and me.

The organizers for the 2010 Olympics didn’t originate the question, “do you believe?”  Listen to what Jesus said in John 11:25, 26 and then answer his question: “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe?”