I hate sweeping. It gets me all existential.

You sweep most of the dust into a pile, but there’s dust on your feet too, so every way you move when you’re sweeping up into the dust pan, you’re still carrying more dirt. You can never get that final line of dust completely up.

And then, the worst part is, you sweep it into a trash can, take the trash outside, and track more dirt in while you’re at it.

Life is just a series of moving dirt around until you die.

I sometimes get lost in existential grief. Like, life is just this big cosmic joke. The good parts are good enough to keep us around, but not much more.

Where I am in this tiny spot in the universe, in this shallow breath in the glacial, yawning arc of geological time, is so small and inconsequential.

I really hate sweeping, and I really like the word faith.

It has these two distinct meanings. Faith as in belief in things unseen, and faith as in a quiet and steady commitment.

When the religious folks talk about faith, they talk about belief in things unseen. But for me and my friends, that’s a rough place to start. Why would I believe in a loving god when my friends have to choose between rent and food? When every day we see fundraisers for things people should just get without a catch, like insulin and top surgery?

Our human lives are so short and ephemeral, how can I believe in a god that made us in their image when our trembling little moment on this earth has wounded the earth so badly?

Faithfulness comes more truly and naturally. We cook each other meals and clean each other’s houses and invite our lonely friends over into our houses. We venmo over the five bucks we were going to spend on going out this month.

And when we are faithful, our faith builds.

We can give, and we build these connections, and we hope and believe someone will catch us next time. Someone will throw a few bucks our way when we need to fundraise for our health needs. Someone will let us stay on their couch when we are in town. Someone will show up for us when we get arrested.

And yeah, it’s not god in the sense of some anthropomorphic being. But it’s god as gritty, dirty love. God as the tenacious line of dust you just can’t quite sweep up.