faith

Photo Credit Fuu J

Happy Mother’s Day to the Mothers reading this today!

If you are reading this you have a Mom. After all, you are here. 😉 You came from your Mom, and you might also be a Mom. We may have many things that separate us, but there’s one thing that we undeniably have in common, we were all born from our Mother’s womb.  

Mother’s Day stirs a variety of emotions in people. If you were blessed to have a good Mom, biological or adoptive, then you feel happiness, respect, love, and honor for Mom today. If your experience was hurtful or negative then or now, today can be a day of sadness or mixed emotions. If you are a Mom with children who have strayed, or you are the child that strayed, today can be emotional and difficult.

“Motherhood is the biggest gamble in the world. It is the glorious life force. It’s huge and scary — it’s an act of infinite optimism.” ~ Gilda Radner 

July 1990 my first son was born. I was 25 years young and thought I was as prepared as I could possibly be for Motherhood. I had experience with babies. I have a sister eleven years my younger. I babysat a lot over the years and worked in the church nursery. I had this, no sweat. At that time, I believed I was fully aware of the fears and concerns that would come with parenting. I sincerely believed I had a full understanding of being faithful and what it means to trust the Lord wholeheartedly.

I had “faith” that God would pave this road for us. I just had to be faithful and raise my sons to know and love the Lord. I had this mentality of pray for it, believe for it, and God will make it happen. Folks, Motherhood broke me! In a good way. I heard a minister once say in his sermon, “marriage and children are an attack on the all-mighty trinity of me, myself, and I.” He. Was. Right!  

Motherhood taught me what it means to have faith, but more importantly, how to live with faith.

In the past two Monday “Jump Starts” I have spoken of two pieces of God’s Armor, “the belt of truth’” and “the shoes of peace,” but there is yet another critical piece of armor God tells us we must wield as we navigate this thing called life, and the fires/battles we will encounter. No one escapes this world unscathed.

Ephesians 6:16, Paul says, “In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one.” What Paul is saying here, is that in addition to, “the belt of truth & the shoes of peace,” we must have faith to fight our battles. This faith is not simple words, but a faith that is active.   

The word "faith" appears 336 times in the King James Version of the Bible and 458 times in the New International Version. It’s clear, faith is very important. It’s a word we hear thrown around all the time. Keep the faith. Walking in faith. Having faith. So, what is it and how does it relate to the faith Paul speaks to in Ephesians 6? What does it mean for my faith to be active?

Faith has several different definitions. 1. Complete trust or confidence in someone or something. 2. Strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than truth. 3. A system of religious belief. 4. A firmly held belief or theory.  (Crosswalk-What is Faith)

All of these definitions are accurate in their own way, but just as there is a worldly truth, and a worldly peace, there is also a worldly faith. The above definitions of faith are partially true for believers, but truer for the way the world defines it. God’s idea of faith requires action as well as belief. Actions that often can be much more difficult than believing.

 By 1997 I had three sons and was fully in the throes of parenting.

From the day my first son, Anthony came home with us, to the births of Jacob and Daniel, day by day I was learning what it meant to have faith. I don’t think anyone can prepare you for the blind faith it takes to raise children. In her quote from above, Radner says, “it’s an act of infinite optimism.” I would actually say it is optimism, but even more, it is having infinite faith.

When our children are small, they are physically with us. They rely on us to go anywhere. We can protect them at that time better than we can as they grow up and away from us. Because of their dependency on me in those days, I had this false sense of being in control and it was easy for me to mistake that sense of “control” as faith.  As children begin their own journeys and start gravitating towards the world and are more and more influenced by others, the awareness of our complete lack of control becomes evident.

As my sons became more independent and began to have more and more of their own thoughts, the real lessons of faith were right in front of me. As they began testing boundaries, questioning beliefs, walking away from church and faith, and rejecting the very things I so desperately wanted them to believe, it devastated me. I was so confused and angry at God.

I couldn’t accept that the negative influences in their lives were having a much greater influence on them than my efforts. I know I am far from perfect, but I tried to live a Godly life, take them to church, youth group, all the things a faithful Mom would do, but God in His infinite wisdom was teaching me a much deeper lesson, but I was unaware. Instead, I felt I was drowning…

You call me out upon the waters
The great unknown
Where feet may fail
And there I find You in the mystery
In oceans deep
My faith will stand

And I will call upon Your name
And keep my eyes above the waves
When oceans rise
My soul will rest in Your embrace
For I am Yours
You are mine

Hillsong-Oceans

I was drowning in fear, guilt, pride, and a sense of failure, beating myself up that my sons turned away from their religion. I assumed it had to be because of me and something I didn’t get right. But God…He was working on me, working to teach me that faith was more than mere words and belief. He was calling me to action, to cut the chains the enemy was using to bind me in self-centeredness, pride, and the “all mighty trinity of me, myself, and I,” and stop making the boys journey about me.

Matthew 14:25-31 New International Version, “(25) Shortly before dawn Jesus went out to them, walking on the lake.(26)When the disciples saw him walking on the lake, they were terrified. “It’s a ghost,” they said, and cried out in fear. (27) But Jesus immediately said to them: “Take courage! It is I. Don’t be afraid.” (28) “Lord, if it’s you,” Peter replied, “tell me to come to you on the water.” (29) “Come,” he said. Then Peter got down out of the boat, walked on the water and came toward Jesus. (30) But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, “Lord, save me!” (31) Immediately Jesus reached out his hand and caught him. “You of little faith,” he said, “why did you doubt?”

The story of Peter and Jesus walking on the water is a clear lesson about the role of faith. Peter feared the storm, and he knew Jesus was his only hope for survival, so he acted. First, Peter called out to Jesus and because he knew the voice of Jesus, Peter trusted even though he couldn’t see through the storm, but as he started to doubt and shifted his focus, he began to sink, but Jesus caught him.

Oh, how often I have done this as a parent. I call out for Jesus to “do something.” Please step in here. Please intervene there. Please grant me the wisdom to know what to do, and when God’s answer is, let go. Give this to me. I grab the request back, take my eyes off Jesus and I stop trusting Him. My faith gets stuck in my head and I ignore and reject the action required when the answer is not an answer I want to act upon.

I believe God was telling me to stop thinking it was up to me to save my sons and step out on the water and trust Him. God calls us out of the shallow, our comfort zone, and into the deep where His work is done. By trusting Him with my sons it would require me to let them go into unchartered waters and believe that God would save them. He opened my eyes to see that I had to actively choose to let go. I needed to get out of the way because just as He made my faith personal, He too would make theirs their own.

The day I let go of the reigns and stopped trying to be the one to “save” my sons was the day I experienced a freedom in my faith. It was a day that I began to really understand that faith is belief and trust, but also action. It requires a willingness to step into the deep, the great unknown where failure is possible, to trust in that which you cannot see, but rest in the assurance that God always has our best interest at heart and His plans are always way better than anything I could ever imagine.

Take comfort in these truths…

(Hillsong-Oceans)

Your grace abounds in deepest waters
Your sovereign hand
Will be my guide
Where feet may fail, and fear surrounds me
You've never failed
And You won't start now                                                                                                            

I haven’t mastered this.

Faith is something I work on each and every day of my life. I have learned that it is way easier to say I have faith and I am a faithful person than it is to actively choose to live it. There is so much that is unknown in the deep, but even when I cannot see through the dark, I believe.

I believe God will complete the work that He began in me and in my sons.

“Faith shows the reality of what we hope for; it is the evidence of things we cannot see. Through their faith, the people in days of old earned a good reputation. By faith, we understand that the whole universe was formed at God’s command, that what we now see did not come from anything that can be seen.” -Hebrews 11:1-3, NLT

Something to consider: Is your faith something in your head, or is it actionable? Stepping out in faith is sometimes scary and difficult, I encourage you to seek support of others when faced with actionable faith decisions. If you want to know more about Jesus or faith, while I’m not a minister, I can help point you in the right direction, email me. We were not meant to travel this journey alone.