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- #134. The faith function
#134. The faith function
Shem Opolot
August 15, 2025
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HAPPY FRIDAY 🎉 What’s something you believe that doesn’t have any real basis? Mine is that we don’t get ideas if we don’t have the capacity to implement them.
LIFE.
The faith function.
If we wiped all memory and all existence and rebooted the world today, we’d still find God again.
Because faith has a function.
When my mum was 22, she witnessed her Aunt B die in front of her—convulsing as the life left her body. But that wasn’t the scariest part. On its way to the ancestral plane, Aunt B’s spirit possessed her daughter and spoke through her, sharing Aunt B’s final words to a jarred but mostly witchcraft-literate audience.
For my mum, that was the day she acknowledged the spirit realm existed.
“If evil spirits exist,” she reasoned, “then good spirits must exist to balance the scales.”
And thus began my mum’s individual journey to the cross. Her faith probably helped her make sense of the new world she inhabited and gave her hope.
***
My wife has dreams that come to pass.
I was skeptical at first because, like some pastors, her prophecies came after the events in question. So I challenged her to keep a record of the prophecies, and the evidence has been astounding. Don’t leave your tithe at our doorstep, but I’ll say: if you’re 3 weeks pregnant and you want to keep it a secret, don’t hang around my wife. She’ll hug you and ask you how you chose the name “Destiny” for your daughter.
Such canon events bother me because they rob me of my right to doubt God’s existence. There, in fact, might be no God. But there is one in my reality.
Like most Ugandans, I was involuntarily indoctrinated into Christianity. I was born, I learned to walk, I learned to talk, and soon, the adults in my life wielded the promise of heaven or the threat of hell like a corrective cane. It took about 16 years before I asked myself if I actually believed in God.
At 16, I bucked my Catholic upbringing and attended fellowship at a Pentecostal church where the hymns were hipper and they liked to force us to turn to our neighbors and repeat proclamations from the pulpit. Never liked that part, but I consider it a life tax.
In joining the Pentecostal church, though my intentions weren’t always pure, my fledgling faith purchased a community that kept me safe during a vulnerable time.
It would be another 5 or 6 years, alone in America, down on my luck, and feeling abandoned by God, that I had to choose Him again. That time, my faith comforted me and gave me hope.
Your faith always serves a purpose for you, and it’s important to know what that purpose is at any given time.
One of the destinations of a nation’s development is the death of faith. A society that solves hunger, poverty, and suffering for the majority soon abandons faith.
Developed nations often become complacent, forgetting the hope and prayer that kept the underdeveloped alive long enough to see a world that forgets what kept the lights on inside when it was dark outside. Yet nothing lasts forever.
What’s the function of your faith today?
THINGS.
A quote.
And so, all evening, the male bird displayed his plumage and the female played her part and asked questions and laughed and feigned more interest than she felt. Both were young, and if neither loved very much, each was still anxious to be admired.
A picture.
It’s so fun to see the world through a 3-year-old’s eyes.
WORK.
What AI tools are you using?
One of my favorite things to do is to experiment with new tech. I try many things, so you don’t have to. Here are some tools I’ve used recently you should try:
Granola: An AI meeting note taker that is much, much better than whatever Zoom and other transcribers are doing
Julius: Data analysis as a skill isn’t dead yet, and you should get my course if you want to level up. But Julius is powerful in the hands of someone who understands how data works.
Happenstance: Have you ever tried to find a useful connection on LinkedIn and struggled with its bloated search? Happenstance tackles that problem in an interesting way.
As always, I’m a man of the people, and all these sites have free trials (which I’m also on).
FUN.
The Friday Fix playlist
Shem’s picks
✅ This 17-year-old German lives on the train full-time
✅ What’s the deal with Airplane mode?
✅ Check out this interesting Airbnb category
✅ Why Sweden has so many billionaires
✅ Ad-free music for sleeping, studying or relaxing
Have a great weekend,
— Shem
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