FAITH

Adam looked up to the sky, wiping his hair away from his forehead. "You know," he began, "I think it's starting to rain."
Kim let out a burst of laughter at Adam's comment. They'd been caught completely unprepared in a torrential downpour for the past few minutes. The church was still a few blocks away.
"Oh well," she replied. "Not much we can do about it now."
Adam grinned, putting his hands back into his jacket pockets. "I think God's trying to tell me that I'm not welcome back."
Kim looked up at the falling rain. "Yeah. You picked a hell of a day to become a churchgoer." She glanced over at Adam inquisitively. "What made you want to come with me?"
"I don't know, really. I used to go to church all the time. I never really meant to stop going, but,..." He trailed off, thinking, then started again. "It used to really feel like God was there, with me, at church. But then it felt that way less and less, and I started going less and less, and eventually not at all."
Kim watched a car splash through a puddle as Adam continued.
"I don't know. Sometimes I just get the feeling that God doesn't even exist at all. Like religion is just a two-thousand-year-old lie." He paused, reflecting on what he'd just said. "I don't want to feel like that anymore."
Kim thought a while before answering. "I get that way sometimes. It's so hard to have faith when there's no proof one way or the other. It's easy to believe in the world around you; it's so solid and tangible.You deal with it on a day-to-day basis. But just because something can't be seen doesn't make it unreal."
Kim looked up to the sky again. "Take human thought, for example. I think the fact that my mind can't be defined by science proves that there are things in this world beyond our comprehension. Just because my thoughts can't be seen or heard or touched, doesn't mean that they don't exist." She shrugged. "And you know, maybe that's all that God is. Maybe He's just a thought shared by millions. Maybe it's just the belief that makes Him real. Who knows?"
Adam nodded. "That's what scares me: the fact that no one knows. It's just hard for me to believe in something without proof."
Kim smiled at him. "You're never going to find anything to definitively prove the existence of God. There's evidence everywhere, but you'll never find proof."
"I don't really see any evidence, either."
"Oh, come on. You don't think the fact that the whole world even exists is pretty damn miraculous? Do you think that particles drifting randomly through outer space, coming together to form a mass of rock the exact distance from a huge ball of burning gas necessary to facilitate life was just a random coincidence? Or how about the fact that a sack of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen is capable of having thoughts, feelings, and emotions, and is free to believe in whatever he chooses?"
They stopped at the light, across the street from the church.
"I know that none of this proves anything," said Kim, watching the cars splash through the rainy intersection, "but it's enough for me to take that leap of faith and say that I believe." She looked to Adam again and shrugged. "But that's me."
The light turned green, and the cars stopped. The rain let up ever so slightly, changing from a heavy downpour to a gentler shower, as Adam followed Kim across the crosswalk.