“If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it will obey you.” – Luke 17:6
People who insist upon seeing with perfect clarity before making a decision, typically get stuck in a state of indecisiveness. The fact is there is no way to research and analyze thoroughly enough to know for sure what the outcome of a decision will be. Ultimately every decision at some point requires a leap of faith, a casting of caution to the wind.
Tee and I met each other on a blind date. A mere six months later we were walking down the aisle. It was a brief courtship for sure – some may have judged it as too short – but so far it has lasted forty-five glorious years. Yet as in love as we were at the time, there is no way we could have had perfect clarity about our compatibility. There came a point where our decision required a leap of faith.
Faith, though, is more and requires more than simply a passive state of belief or trust. Faith is a call to action. To use marriage in another example, it was the occasion of my brother and sister-in-law’s fiftieth wedding anniversary when their grandson – himself about to be engaged – asked his grandfather, “Granddad, how do you stay married for fifty years?” “You just do,” my brother replied. A flippant answer? Hardly! In fact, I thought it was one of the most brilliant and wisdom-filled treasures a grandfather could pass along to his grandson. To make the decision to wed is always a leap of faith. But for the marriage to be successful and life-long-lasting requires action – every day for the rest of their lives. In other words, “you just do.”
Faith and action are inevitably intertwined. That is, while a decision to act requires a level of faith, having faith is also a call to act. Even faith itself, some have suggested, is a verb not a noun; that faith occurs through an act of will in deciding. Taking a leap of faith (action/verb), in other words, is to trust ourselves and/or others to do and accomplish, while also trusting in God’s divine intervention. This applies to changing jobs or careers, starting a new business, relocating to a new city, and most every other endeavor – including marriage. First we must have faith, then “you just do.”