This weekend I spent the majority of my Saturday eating up the last 100 pages of the third book in Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn Trilogy, The Hero of Ages. The previous book concluded amid the messy aftermath of the final showdown between several warring kingdoms and left the reader with a hopeful but dark sense of foreboding for a far greater threat still to come.

In the last stage of the journey, this superior menace finally reveals itself and is every bit the challenge that we all feared. Throughout the story many beloved characters are led to question their ideals, their abilities and even their own memories in an epic struggle against a deific foe. Although this is a fantasy novel written primarily to entertain, the thoughts and doings of one character caught my attention and made me ponder some big questions of my own. 

Sazed, a kindly scholar and purveyor of the lost religions of the Final Empire eventually finds himself in a crisis of faith and on a quest for universal Truth. Along the way, he asks questions that I’ve come across in my life and reached similar conclusions. 

“It wasn’t the grand doctrines or the sweeping ideals that seemed to make believers out of people. It was the simple magic in the world around them.”

I strive everyday to embrace the small magic of life, although some days, this is more challenging than others. In my experience, people who are not ready to find faith tend to demand extreme and undeniable shows of divinity as proof but, as one character pointed out to Sazed, to seek a religion that requires no faith of its believers is to search for something that cannot be found. A lot of people spend their lives begging for godly signs to put them on the right path and miss all those little, seemingly insignificant moments when the world did exactly that. It is these moments that make believers as Sazed discovered even as the world was crashing down around him. 

“He would believe. Not because something had been proven to him beyond his ability to deny. But because he chose to.”

You have to choose to believe. As humans we are by our very nature unable to comprehend and understand the fullness of God. Yet, people believe anyway. They know there will always be questions and that many of us are ill equipped to answer them. But it’s strange how, even at the world’s ending, those who choose to believe can still find proof of faith.