"How can you believe in God?"

"Don’t you know there are little children dying of cancer? How could there be a loving, all-powerful God who lets that happen?"

The conclusion that worldly people draw is that God cannot exist: because their concept of a loving God is incompatible with the reality of innocent children suffering from natural causes.

The gap in their logic is pretty obvious: it is not God but their concept of God that is incompatible with reality.

In a sense, it is infantile to presume that the only things that exist are the things we experience. How childish it is for anyone to think that something cannot exist simply because he or she cannot understand it. How arrogant it is for a finite mind to deny unfathomable infinity.

There is more than what we know. There is more than this world.

St. Paul speaks about these things much more lyrically in today’s first reading. He speaks of “spiritual realities in spiritual terms” - realities that extend beyond this world: spiritual realities that can only be appreciated with a spiritual perspective, answers to this world's tragedies that can only be understood beyond this world.

While we live in this world, it is very important for us not to be bogged down in the world’s ways of thinking and acting: selfishness, greed, lust, envy, and despair.

We should always seek the help of the Spirit to keep our minds and our hearts on a higher plane, so that we may thrive and shine as spiritual beings in a dark and material world and so that by our faith, hope, and love we may give evidence of the loving God who dwells among us in this world and into infinity.