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Growing up in public schools and in a family that rarely went to church, I used to have a lot of confusion when it came to the connections between faith, reason, and truth. I think the biggest misconception that I had was that faith and reason were in conflict with each other, as if they were opposite sides and people could only base their lives on one or the other.

Over time I've learned and experienced enough to believe this divided way of thinking doesn't work for the reality of everyday life. People need faith just as much as they need reason, and I think a lot of truth can be revealed from the healthy combination of both.

When I was 19, I started going to church on a regular basis at the invitation of a friend. Up until that time, I'd been drilled on evolution and basically atheist philosophy in college for a couple of years. Fortunately I didn't shut my mind down about God and Jesus just because of the viewpoints of a few instructors I was forced to sit through to get a degree.

I had to recognize however the fact it was going to take me longer to understand how faith really worked compared to someone who hadn't dealt with that kind of long-term bias. For my situation, faith had to be developed and involved a lot of inner struggle. At 24, I'm glad I took the time because it was an extremely important aspect of my life that had been missing for a long time. I think one of the hardest things in life is being miserable and not knowing why. I was academically bright but still ignorant about a lot of things, and that ignorance caused overall harm in my life.

Through several years of learning about God and the Bible from our church's pastors as well as several other Christians who I consider brilliant people in general, I've overcome a lot of negativity toward faith that I was basically taught in school. If you learn enough about faith to know how and when to apply it, it does work.

A great analogy I've heard that explains faith well is that trusting in God and the Bible is a lot like a pilot who trusts a lookout in an airport control tower and his or her instruments during a fog. If you have no access to your lookout or your instruments, you could fly into a mountain or into the ground thinking you're doing fine the entire time. Also I would hope most people would find it unreasonable for the pilot to ignore the warnings and instructions of a lookout in favor of trying to blindly fly on his or her own. That's a relatively small example, but in general faith is not unreasonable when you know the purpose of it.

That's basically my perspective coming from where I'm at right now. I realize I still have a lot to learn, but I feel better about the foundation I have for my life compared to where I was 5 or 6 years ago. I think it's very important what people do on a daily basis to move forward, and it comes down to a decision of wanting to seek truth. It's not always easy, but it's worthwhile.

Learn more about this author, Patricia Gilliam.
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