We took a short trip one weekend and, as is often the case, my husband and I were having a wonderful discussion about faith in the car. We were going along on this conversation and things were going quite well, I thought, when suddenly my husband took a left turn and used something that I said to criticize me.

Suddenly, I found myself in the position of defending myself and I was starting to get defensive with him, but I instead stopped the conversation completely and said, “You know, we were having this really nice conversation about faith and suddenly you decided to make it an attempt to change something you don’t like in me. Why would you do that?” My husband didn’t respond, and the result was a lapse into silence for about five miles.

These types of interactions happen in every marriage, I’m certain. It is sometimes just too tempting to try to change your partner to be exactly what you want them to be. Unfortunately, it is impossible to accomplish and it usually ends badly.

I think that we do this in a lot of areas of our lives. I think we do it in faith as well. We want everyone to conform to our way of thinking in every way and that just isn’t possible or even realistic. It is tempting to fall prey to the ideal that we are the only ones who have all the right answers. The truth is, we make mistakes and in making those mistakes, we have to accept that there will always be a certain level of fallacy in our judgement. Whether in factual error or in judgement that is colored by our own experiences, we must know and accept that we can’t possibly know or understand every aspect of God and that is why we have to learn to be tolerant.

We don’t become tolerant because we aren’t strong enough in our faith, but because arguing someone into our way of thinking is a disservice to them. They, like us, have to discover faith from within their hearts the same way that we discovered it within our own hearts. They have to filter it through their own set of problems and experiences in their own lives.

As I look back over my faith, I recall times when I held onto fallacious beliefs and ideas. Many of the philosophies that I have held in my youth are completely opposite now as I have gotten older. However, God has not changed. He is still the same, but I believe that the reason that He reveals Himself through stories and the reason that He is so mysterious is because He wants us to be involved in the discovery of Him. It is in discovering God, that we really learn to appreciate His Greatness.

If God can be tolerant, then surely we can be tolerant as well. When I think about the people I know who aren’t religious, I think of them not as a someone who is lost, but as someone who has not yet felt the need of God. In this way, I can have hope for them and for the potential of their faith.

God is patient and chooses to nudge us gently from the inside. We should take a clue from Him and not try to change others or argue others into our belief system. We should instead love, respect, and accept them as they are, created by God for a purpose that perhaps they have yet to discover. God asked us to be light in a dark world and shine on people. He didn’t ask us to lassoe people, beat them over the head, and drag them kicking and screaming into our faith. Christianity has tried all of those methods over the centuries, but the most beneficial method was servanthood. It takes more faith to give way to tolerance than it does to use Biblical weaponry and argumentative methods.