My trick for "increasing" your faith

(spoiler: it's lowering the bar)

Dear Nadia,

Do you have uncertainty? I LOVE Jesus, but my faith is wobbly at best. Is your faith ever wobbly?

-Donna

Dear Nadia,

How do we increase our faith?

-Jason

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Dear Donna and Jason,

For most of my life I thought that the only physical exercise that “counted” was going for a run, or working out at the gym - those sorts of things. And there were times in my life I would do just that for 30 minutes a day and then be sedentary for 23 ½ hours.

But I have started wearing a fitness tracker and am stunned to see how on days I don’t “workout” I still walk 10,000 steps a day just living my life. Just doing things like housework and grocery shopping – things I never thought counted as “fitness”.

So Donna and Jason, you probably have a lot more faith than you realize.

Because when it comes to spiritual fitness – sometimes in our lives we can hit the God Gym so to speak, and sometimes we just can’t and in those seasons, try and trust that there are a lot of spiritually unassuming parts of our lives that have an element of faith to them and that those parts really do add up.

Here’s an incomplete list:

If you dream about a good future for your children, that’s a form of faith.

If you are moved by the faith of your ancestors, that also counts.

If you have doubts – that is also a form of faith because at least you’re still engaged in the question.

Do you hold those you love in your heart when they are suffering? And even ask God to come to their aid? Faith.

Do you, as you say, LOVE JESUS? …totally counts.

Do you see the inherent dignity of other human beings – also faith.

Have you asked someone to pray for you because you just can’t pray right now? Faith.

Is there a feeling of gratitude for anything at all in your life - I mean AT ALL? That’s a kind of faith.

Here’s a good one: do you ever complain or tell God off? In the Bible, that’s called a lament – and you know what? It’s a form of faith.

All of that is to say, all the faith you need is already there no matter your thoughts and feelings at any given moment.

My own faith morphs and shifts into things that my Sunday School self would never recognize.

I guess I just no longer think of faith as intellectually assenting to theological propositions, or as regularly confirming in myself that I believe all the wildest stories in the Bible are literally, factually, historically accurate. Faith functions in my life as something closer to gravity than ideology.

So, as I’ve been known to say, if you are straining to touch a faith that feels out of reach and judging yourself for falling short please know this: God always puts all the best shit on the bottom shelf.

I promise.

So maybe your prayer for today doesn’t need to be Lord, increase my faith, but Lord increase my awareness of what faith already looks like in my life.

In it with you,

Nadia

p.s. - what counts as faith in your own life??

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