Sometimes it’s easier than we think. Sometimes we just make it harder than it actually is. What am I talking about? The Gospel. It can be the easiest or most difficult message to understand and accept.

I once heard a quote that went like this, “I don’t know how a brown cow eats green grass and I get white milk and yellow cheese … but I eat cheese and drink milk.” That one quote has motivated me more than many other quotes I have heard in my life. Think it over for a minute. There are many things we just accept without questioning how it works or why it works. There are many things that we trust regardless of our inability to understand how they work or why they work.

Each time you pull up to a traffic light you stop when it is red. Likewise you “go” when it turns green. How often do you take the time to stop and try to figure out how “it” knows when to turn red, yellow or green? Moreover, why is it that you trust the judgment of a machine that you don’t understand to direct you in driving safely?

We trust the worker with the orange vest on the side of the road to say “stop” and “slow” with a sign in his or her hand and a radio in the other.

In all of this we are simply trusting without actually knowing all the inner workings, all the nuances, knowing all of the factors that are contributing to our decision to simply “obey.”

We trust the person on the side of the road with our lives and that person has no interest in our personal lives, our hurts, our sufferings, our concerns and our needs. We trust and obey a machine with our lives as we place our hopes and our safety in the colors red, yellow and green.

Yet when we read the Gospel message instead of simply accepting it, we want to argue over how many days Christ was entombed for, how many fish came out of his fish miracle, how many animals were on the Arc.

Maybe it’s not as complicated as we would like to make it. Maybe it’s just as simple as John wrote in chapter 3:16 of his Gospel:

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

If you obey a traffic light that you can’t figure out and a person in an orange vest you don’t know; if you eat cheese and drink milk, then you probably already have faith. It’s just a matter of where you are placing it. Accepting without knowing it all and knowing without understanding it all.

REV. BARRY VASSAR can be reached at fitzgeraldmemorial@gmail.com.