She says her family
shuns her. She says

it has something to do
with God. She says

the cancer has gone
way too far. She says

when her brother died
the family pastor said

he went straight to hell
and “Let that be a lesson.”

She says, “Will you do
my funeral?” A light rain

falls on the lake,
circles in circles.

On “Faith”

Faith is a noun. It’s a person, place, or thing.

An online etymology site tells me it came into English in the mid-13th Century.

The word means, the site tells me, “duty of fulfilling one’s trust.”

The word comes to English from Old French: feid, foi, which meant “faith, belief, trust, confidence, pledge.”

The word came to Old French from Latin: fides, which meant “trust, faith, confidence, reliance, credence, belief.”

The word ultimately derives from from the oldest known ancestor of English, Proto-Indo European: *bheidh- which also gave us the Greek word for faith, the one that appears in Christian scripture, pistis.

The dictionary notes that the word in its theological sense dates from the late 14th Century. Meaning this: What religions today mean by faith, as in “you gotta have faith,” did not exist as a concept when the Christian scriptures were written.

I’m just sayin’ . . .

See for yourself: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=faith