For Granted

3/11/2021

Luke 17:5 "The apostles said to the Lord, 'Increase our faith!'"

Yesterday's blog was about faith. I shared a chair analogy that my husband came up with during our morning devotional. Yesterday the focus was on how we do not recognize the chair that is strong and reliable; we don't have to think about the chair holding us up when we sit, we just have faith that it will. We put faith in many things every day. We believe that water will come out of the faucet for morning showers, we believe our heat will work and our cars will start, we believe our homes will still be there at the end of our day, and our ovens will work when we go to prepare dinner. We believe these things without much thought or gratitude until we have an issue with one of them. Most of the things we put our faith in, we almost always take for granted. We even do this with people in our lives. 

On this day last year, the CDC declared Covid-19 a pandemic, and the everyday things we put our faith in being constant disappeared. It is true that our kitchen chairs still may have held us up, but everything else became topsy-turvy. Most of us could not leave our homes to go to work. We were not able to go to church, shop, or gather with family and friends. Our cars stayed parked most of the time, and we could not (in the beginning) even leave our yards. We began to notice every small things that we took for granted, and longed for the lock-down to slow the spread and finally be over. This, as you all know, did not happen quickly. It actually has not happened yet, although it is true that more and more people are getting vaccinated and there is a light at the end of this very long tunnel. The absolute worst thing about this time is the amount of loss that has happened, not just in our country, but around the world. It is just too much to comprehend.

So, I return to faith and the chair. This morning, my husband had a little different take on it. He told me that although we do not recognize the chair or show it gratitude for its reliability, we have faith in it because we can trust it to be there and be strong. Your faith in it is so strong that you don't have to question weather it will hold you or not. This, he said, is a lot like our faith in God. We should have such strong faith that He is always there that we don't even have to think about it; for this just becomes our internal, unshakable truth. I know that this often unuttered faith is what has kept us going during this long and difficult year.