Recursion and Faith

When I was at Glendale, my programming teacher did spend a little time in recursion.  In programming, recursive algorithms involve method calls to itself, basically creating a chain of method calls until the it accomplishes its tasks.  My teacher at Glendale was not fond of recursion, because as someone who worked/works on video games, recursion uses up a lot of memory...and you don't want a lot of memory being taken up in games.  So she never emphasized using it.


However my programming teacher this semester at CSUN loves recursion.  The idea behind it is simple: you break down a difficult problem into smaller, easier problems.  But if you actually run through the code step by step, there are a lot of things going on and lots of things to keep track of.


My teacher assures us that recursion is easy to understand, because all you have to do is have "faith" in it.  As long as you understand the general big picture you want to accomplish and code to that end, just have "faith" that it'll work.  He said it's way to difficult to try to understand what is happening behind the scenes in recursion, but says that we need to have faith and trust that everything will work out.  If recursive algorithms are basically method calls to itself, creating a chain, questions like "When do recursive algorithms end if it just keeps looping into itself?" arise.  Again, our professor says to not worry so much about what's going on, but have faith that it will work.


I actually have quite a chuckle every time he talks about recursion like this; I think it's pretty funny when he says to put "faith" in recursion, to put faith into something that is so visually hard to understand.  But I thought that it sounded a lot like our faith as Christians.


Faith is a tremendous component in our walks.  There are a lot of unknowns we recognize as we continue in our walks.  We may pray things to God for Him to answer for us, but we're not even sure if it's in His will to answer it now, at a later time, or answer it at all.  We don't know how God works, and at times it is really frustrating because the question arises, "How do we know God is there at all?" even "If God works."  If you're a Christian, you've definitely struggled with that in your hearts; I definitely have.


But that's just a reminder of what faith is.  The writer of Hebrews tells us "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of the things not seen." (Heb. 11:1 - ESV)   Faith will only exist in our hearts if we undoubtedly know that God is there. If our faith in Him slips, so does our recognition of His presence. But the very essence of faith is what the author of Hebrews describes, the assurance of the things hoped for, of the things unseen. Even if we don't know how God is working, we do know he does work, because we've seen Him work throughout the ages, and His character never changes.

I may not know how what goes behind the scenes in recursion; having faith in it is pretty difficult because it's difficult to visualize what's going on. But I know it does work, why? Because I've seen the end result, and it proves to me that it does work. God shows us His works all the time, through answered and unanswered prayers. Most importantly, you've seen Him transform your own life.

So even if we don't know how He works, just look at the finished result. That's proof enough, and reason enough to continue to have faith.