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Throughout Sophie’s and my relationship and marriage, a common thread has been experiencing nature and animals. We were lucky recently to have an opportunity to go on a 2 day (total) safari in South Africa.
Most tours go in a giant 10 passenger jeep (not including the driver). It is open air to give a more immersive experience with the wildlife. Don’t worry though, we were told we were safe as long as we didn’t stand up or reach out of the vehicle, which was very much the case.
Thankfully, except for one morning, we were only with about three other people. That meant we often had one row to ourselves with space for me to look on one side and Sophie to look on the other.
Now there are two ways I could have played this. I could have focused on one side and let Sophie focus on the other, or I could keep turning my head back and forth to see if I could catch a glimpse of any animals.
As I was thinking this through, my mind went back to one of our first nature outings as a couple to Glacier National Park in Montana. We were driving down the road when a huge grizzly bear walked across. It freaked me out a little, but Sophie didn’t see anything. In all fairness, she was our navigator and looking at the map at the time.
I realized that was a very different situation, but there was nothing else in my experience with Sophie to go on. Yet I decided to trust her to catch a glimpse of any animal that came up on her side. I decided to focus on my side and let her focus on hers.
Later on, Sophie spotted the only pair of hyenas we saw on the trip. They were sleeping together right on the side of the jeep where no one else could have seen them, except for Sophie that is.
I trusted that Sophie could do something I had no idea of whether she could or not. I had no idea what the results would be. Turns out they were better than I ever could have imagined.
Faith, it’s a word we hear about a lot today. When we hear the word ‘faith’, we often translate that as ‘belief’ in our minds. With our modern sensibilities, belief tends to be connected with existence. So when we say we have ‘faith’ in God, we typically mean we ‘believe He exists.’
Faith means a lot more than mere belief. The word ‘faith’, the ancient word for faith, actually means ‘to trust’. Faith is what I had in Sophie because I trusted in her. Not only did I trust, I did so without any experience that I could trust her to spot anything as amazing as those hyenas.
That kind of faith, that trust, is what we are called on to have in God. It is this faith, this trust, that caused Abram, later and more famously known as Abraham, to leave the land of his father behind and go where God asked him to go.
This is no small thing God is asking. He’s asking Abraham to leave everything he has known. He’s asking him to leave his comfort and inheritance behind. He’s asking him to go into the great unknown having no idea what exactly will happen.
Did Abraham even know God? Was God a god he worshipped? We don’t know. There’s a possibility that the answer is “yes” as he meets a priest of God, King Melchizedek of Salem, later on his journey, so clearly worshipping God was not unheard of at that time. Either way, he’s taking a big risk with no idea if God will make good on his promise to make Abraham “a great nation.”
Abraham’s trust in God doesn’t stop there. As Paul tells us, it continues throughout this journey. It continues when God promises him a son through his wife Sarah. It continues in this promise even though they are both extremely old and well past child-rearing years. It continues even though God promises the seemingly impossible. It continues through the impossible finally being how God fulfills His very first promise to Abraham.
Abraham trusts in God, even when he has no reason to do so. Genesis says this was “reckoned to him as righteousness” just as Paul reminds us.
This same faith, this same trust, is what causes Matthew to go after Jesus when the only words our Lord says to him are “Follow Me.” It is this trust that leads the leader of the synagogue to ask Jesus to raise his daughter from the dead, even though such a task is impossible. It is what leads the woman with the hemorrhage to have faith that if she only touches Jesus’ cloak, she will be healed from this affliction that has been with her for all of twelve years.
To have faith doesn’t mean to simply believe in God’s existence. It means so much more than that. To have faith means to trust in God. That faith cannot be founded in anything we have experienced. How can it be when God so often does the impossible? We trust not because of what we know, but because we assume that God is trustworthy. We don’t need for God to prove that. We simply have to have faith, to trust, to believe.