What is faith?

I'm now up to chapter 57 in Eat, pray, love and I'm finally getting a feel for Liz Gilbert's understanding of her faith in God.  During her time in Rome she explored pleasure, specifically good food; at her ashram in India she is exploring devotion.  This is her view of religious practice:

Every religion in the world operates on the same common understandings of what it means to be a good disciple - get up early and pray to your God, hone your virtues, be a good neighbour, respect yourself and others, master your cravings.  We all agree that it would be easier to sleep in, and many of us do, but for millennia there have been others who choose instead to get up before the sun and wash their faces and go to their prayers.  And then fiercely try to hold on to their devotional convictions throughout the lunacy of another day.

She then goes on to comment on the nature of faith:

If faith were rational, it wouldn't be - by definition - faith.  Faith is belief in what you cannot see or prove or touch. Faith is walking face-first and full-speed into the dark.  If we truly knew all the answers in advance as to the meaning of life and the nature of God and the destiny of our souls, our belief would not be a leap of faith and it would not be a courageous act of humanity; it would just be... A prudent insurance policy.  

I have to say, all of this sound like a lot of hard work to me.  First of all, there is the hard work of training your body to get up early (around 4am in the ashram); then of concentrating on your prayers; and finally the struggle to hold on to these religious feelings through a normal, unpredictable day.  Then there is the hard work of screwing yourself up to believe something for which you have no proof, because any attempt to prove the subject of your beliefs would render your faith meaningless.  

I do agree with Gilbert when she asserts that, despite what religious people will try and tell you, you cannot prove the existence of God or the validity of any religion.  There is always a point where rational evidence breaks down.  I would not describe my faith as a belief I hold on to in the absence of any evidence, however.  For me, faith is not belief so much as trust - trust in a person revealed in the Bible.  I cannot prove God exists; although the evidence for the existence of a man called Jesus is pretty conclusive, I cannot prove Jesus was divine.  But the God in three persons, Father, Son and Spirit, whose encounters with humankind are recorded in the Bible, is someone I can trust.  

I once read an article which compared faith with sitting in a chair; if the chair is sturdy, the argument went, it will hold your weight, no matter how little trust you have in its power to do so.  Likewise, if God is trustworthy, he will bear us up regardless of how much or little faith we have in him.  In other words, my faith depends, not on me, but on the God in whom I trust.  In the same way, I would argue, the Christian life I lead depends not on my own efforts to be virtuous - whether that be getting up early in the morning to pray (like that's going to happen) or attending church services or whatever - but on God.  He speaks to me even when I'm not listening; he gives me the grace to respond to difficult situations with love even when I don't feel like being loving; he uses my small efforts and makes them so much greater.  That is the only kind of religion that interests me: one based on the work of God.