“The villagers 10 minutes away really needed a doctor, and the only way to get them there was by flying.  The pilot knew he only had 3 minutes of fuel in the plane, but he trusted God.  So he took them up!  He flew 10 minutes, but there was fighting where he needed to land.  So he kept going until he found a spot to land.  He ended up flying for 30 minutes!  God made his plane not crash!”

He tells me the story he heard at church, filled with the excitement that only a 9 year-old boy’s love of adventure can have.

And I wonder what it’s like to have faith like that.

I was brought up on bold stories like these.  I learned that if you have faith as small as a mustard seed you can move mountains.  I spent several years in a Pentecostal denomination, and the pattern I was taught was ask, believe, get.  You have to believe for it.  Claim it.  God’s movement depends on your faith.

But my faith wouldn’t have let me worry about the airplane crashing, because I wouldn’t have gotten in it in the first place.  Only 3 minutes of fuel?  Of course you can’t go anywhere in that.

I don’t know if I trust God in that impossible way.  I don’t know if I have faith that he’d provide in miraculous ways.  Providing in everyday ways, that partly depend on our action and responsibility? Yes.  Providing without our help?  Probably not.

That struggle to believe in such vivid ways has often meant I’ve felt as if I’m failing in my spirituality somehow.  If all it takes is a mustard seed to do amazing things, then I must not have even that.  The smallest measure of faith must be eluding me.

But, is it possible that an evasive faith is just as valid as a bold faith?

Of that Old Testament holy trio, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Abraham is the one that is heralded as the person to imitate.  But buried in the story of Jacob, God is revealed as the Fear of Isaac.  We glorify Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son, but do we think about what that did to Isaac?

We honor these extreme acts of faith, and when it doesn’t work out, we honor the martyrs.  A win for courage all around.

And yet, it isn’t the title of obedient or fearful which is given to the people of God.  Instead, it is Israel.  Jacob’s struggle became their identity.

“Jacob’s God was the God who was in the story.  It is only slowly, as we move through Scripture, that this God among many gods becomes the God who is One, the God who is All.  The human being’s attempt to understand the Creator is never static; it is constantly in motion.” – Madeline L’Engle

Could it be that by wrestling, I am actually engaging in deep faith?  Maybe I couldn’t fly an airplane on an empty tank of gas.  But maybe I don’t need to.  Maybe I’m comparing my personality of faith against a different one.

What do you do when the acceptable containers of faith you grow up with don’t fit the shape of your own?  When the metaphors given by Jesus turn into success barometers?

I used to pray and visualize a mustard seed, trying to figure out how an abstract thing such as faith could be contained, measured, judged by this little yellow dot.  (Not to mention the theological trauma that comes when you learn the mustard seed really isn’t the smallest seed.)

I have been taught the measure of my faith depends on how much I trust the miraculous possibility.

Possibility?  Yes.  Miraculous?  It’s hard.

I am learning to notice those times when God seems to be speaking big things to me.  I’m an intuitive person, and God speaks to me intuitively.  That I can sometimes recognize it feels like a miracle, an act of faith larger than a seed.

The old interactions with God were so much deeper than seeds.  Our ancestors of faith had promises and tents, altars of rocks, wandering souls, promised thighs, tricking, wrestling, idols and wells; and somehow these 3 ancient men had an understanding of who God was and what he was doing with them.

It helps me to remember we’re given 500 years of life in 38 chapters; the highlights of their lives.  We don’t get the daily routine of packing up the tents, the slow plodding across the land, the monotonous routine of farming and herding, digging wells in the desert, or the ordeal of having 12 boys (and countless others) running around.

The Bible stories don’t tell us about the days when God seems silent or absent.  We judge Rachel for having idols.  We don’t ask why she needed them.

What does it mean to have faith?  When we feel those invisible threads pulling us to something different and we follow them, is that mustard seed faith?  Is it the packing up your tent and leaving for an unknown land kind of faith?  Can the absence of anxiety in the face of change indicate the Presence?

Does it matter?

Is it a mustard seed when I can only tentatively tell a few people, I think this is where God is leading us, afraid if I speak it aloud, and it turns out to not be the case, that I will be shown to be one of no faith?  Of one who mistakes hopes for Spirit?

Must metaphor be a measuring stick?

What is faith anyway?

Stories of missionaries beating the odds, having tangible miracles can be inspiring to a child.  But can that translate when our miracle may look like putting a house into boxes?

I may not have a stone altar of remembrance built to sustain my faith, and I doubt I’ll be making any death-defying flights in Africa anytime soon.  But the signs of my intuitive faith often tend to look more like poetry than metaphor anyway.

And may peace rain down from Heaven
Like little pieces of the sky
Little keepers of the promise
Falling on these souls
This drought has dried