Sometimes faith feels powerful enough to bubble up and burst out of me. Sometimes I’ve worked to keep that faith, like my breaths, steady. Yet as I worried over illness and my possible death, I realized that if my faith does have size, mass, or volume, it isn’t likely to measure up to the storied mustard seed.
The trouble with faith, I reasoned, is that it actually requires faith. In the past, grace had emboldened me and helped me discern where best to leap. Grace gave me confidence to appreciate life and fanned my faith when I doubted. I can plan and act, but grace is faith’s fuel. On my own, I was not capable of something so extraordinary.
I tell myself that, although my faith dwindled to microscopic size, at least it was there. That’s something—a place to start. And even when I feel I don’t have much of that mustard-seed faith, God is with me, making it enough.
This message is an excerpt from “The trouble with faith” by Karris Golden in the November 2020 issue of Gather magazine. Passover, a major Jewish holiday, begins today and ends Sunday, April 4.
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