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When the change came, it came subtly, like a thief in the night, taking away something precious and irreplaceable.

"Well maybe Santa will bring you a deer rifle for Christmas," I told Lawrence. "That is, if you behave and are a good boy. You don't want to be on Santa's naughty list."

A broad smile came over Lawrence's 11-year-old freckled face. "Sure Dad," he said, eyes twinkling.

"So what are you smiling about," I shot back.

"Oh nothing, Dad. Nothing at all. Just wondering about the deer rifle."

And so it happened. My heartstrings twanged and my eyes misted up. Time rolls on.

Then came the confessions. How the clues added up. Our various cover-up stories over the years suddenly were placed in the context of a bigger picture. Faith was shaken.

That's what it's all about, isn't it? Faith. We have our eyes and ears. We use our senses from the moment we are born to suck in countless bits of information. Our young brains are vacuum cleaners.

As we age, our developing brains filter this vast data, throwing out most of it and stitching what we deem important into an ironclad construct of reality. When things do not fit this reality, we dismiss them as not real, as fantasy, as pretend.

But we miss something. We miss something very big. We miss the fact that our entire reality is limited by our meager human senses. We are only privy to the tiniest slices of the big picture.

Take the electromagnetic spectrum as a case in point. Our eyes can see only about one hundredth of the entire spectrum. We are totally blind to the rest. Infrared, violet, X-rays, ultraviolet - all these forms of radiation are invisible to us. We only see a tiny fraction of our four-dimensional world.

Now physics and math are determining that our four perceivable dimensions - length, width, height and time - are but a fraction of the total dimensions of our world. In fact, there are multiple dimensions that we can prove mathematically, but have no ability to even comprehend. That's why cosmologist Stephen Hawkins said math was the language of God.

Science - which was for centuries seen as debunking God - has now come full circle. There's plenty of room for God at the most advanced levels of our scientific development.

As we acquire more and more knowledge, the percent of what we don't know grows even larger. We realize the extent of our blindness. Lost in the dark, we know little by our own design.

Yes, you are free to believe that we are just the random accumulation of replicating particles that evolved through expanses of time to attain a brain capable of self reflection. In this view, there is no heaven or hell, just brief life and nothingness. There is no good or evil, no right or wrong, nothing of any consequence whatsoever other than momentary pleasure, if that. We are just ironic artifacts of replication, doomed to sparkle and die. There is no meaning, no hope, no future only an infinity of nothingness.

We are equally free to believe that every life is precious. That the world was created by a loving God who loved us so much that he sent his son to take our form and through this gain understanding into our dilemma, understanding that reconciled humanity with its creator through the unfathomable depth of Jesus Christ and the trinity. In this world-view, there is no despair, only hope for reconciliation and everlasting meaning. Every moment is precious, every smile forged forever in God's eternity. There is everlasting life. Our life is but the first step in a beautiful journey of reconciliation with God.

Don't look to science or human logic for guidance. That is a delusion. It is your choice.

I don't know about you, but option number two seems much more appealing to me. I choose faith.

Yes, I struggle daily with my faith. That is the human condition. We are not alone in this struggle. Everywhere are helping hands and heads and hearts. The Holy Spirit is like this vast reservoir of power, faith and strength just waiting to be tapped, but you must seek it.

I read a book this year by Nobel prize winning cosmologist George Smoot. Mr. Smoot was the driving force behind a huge project to discover the origin of the universe. It is a fascinating book. The project led the team to the wilds of the Antarctic and to the launch of a special instrument into outer space. The book is exciting, as any account of an exploration into uncharted territories should be.

However, I was totally unprepared for the final chapter, in which Smoot - the ultimate practical scientist - confessed that science had reached the end of the line.

Smoot wrote: Cosmology - through the marriage of astrophysics and particle physics - is showing that this complexity flowed from a deep simplicity as matter metamorphosed through phase transitions. Travel back in time through those phase transitions and we see an ever-greater simplicity and symmetry, with the fusion of the fundamental forces of nature and the transformation of particles to ever-more fundamental components. Go back further and we reach a point when the universe was nearly an infinitely tiny, infinitely dense concentration of energy, a fragment of primordial space-time. This increasing simplicity and symmetry of the universe as we near the point of creation gives me hope that we can understand the universe using the power of reason and philosophy.

Go back even further still, beyond the moment of creation - what then? What was there before the big bang? What was there before time began? Facing this, the ultimate question, challenges our faith in the power of science to find explanations of nature. The existence of a singularity - in this case the given, unique state from which the universe emerged - is anathema to science, because it is beyond explanation. There can be no answer to why such a state existed. Is this then where scientific explanation breaks down and God takes over, the artificer of that singularity, that initial simplicity?

George Smoot, the ultimate explorer, travelled to the point of creation and found God. If he can do that, we can all believe in the promise of Christianity. And Santa too!