How To Develop Faith Like A baby

I’m one crazy basketball freak. I don’t play, circumstantially so, but I remember I’d wake up real early during playoffs and follow games especially when it was my team playing. Not watching, following by reading updates on my phone and refreshing pages. Ask me if I know anyone who played in yesteryears and I’ll pull you names of guys I’ve never seen or even watched play. Oscar Robertson, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Isaiah Thomas, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, I could go on and on. They all have their names enshrined in the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame, basketball’s house of immortals.

I know Kobe and Tim Duncan will be there too in a few years; Lebron and Stephen Curry too. Those guys will be all time greats, no disrespect to his flyness Michael Jordan. They’ll be remembered for outshining their peers and making all other great plays on court by other players look pedestrian. Like Abraham, Moses, David, Daniel in the Bible. You can’t be a Christian and not know them. They highlight that Hall of Faith list in Hebrews 11. Amazingly not so much because of what they did, but because of what someone else did. Isn’t it beautiful that to make the cut for the Bible’s version of Naismith Memorial you don’t need to put your body through grueling practices and outplay everyone, but simply believe?

I’ve always wanted to be there. Not so that I be remembered but that the one who got me there be honored. The way we see the greatness of Abraham’s God when we consider the greatness of his faith. Enough to hold a knife at his son’s throat at God’s asking. So I’ve made some life choices that some will find radical and quite impressive. An example: I labored for almost a year for this girl I believed was THE ONE. I then let her go in less than a month of relationship coz God asked me to. I wait for two years in covenant with God that if she was indeed the ONE He’d bring her back after that long. And exactly after two years, we get back together so that now we are on course to getting married. Incredible! Right?

I also heeded a call to full time ministry straight out of college. Of course after battling with worries of how I won’t be able to do any much for my family as I hoped because I’d have to live off of support from people. Few ministries pay. In most you raise resources (something so many who don’t understand term as begging) to fulfill your calling. You’d think that’s hard. We should all be done and out by now. Turns out so many enjoy it and find being ‘dependents’ more fulfilling. Simply because God convicted so and by faith we obeyed; obedience that satisfies and assures more security than any six-figure salary job you’d think of.

I have an experience of a very consistent partner withdrawing her support after having grown it to 80 USDs a month. Now not many Christians in Kenya will support with that much considering how foreign the concept of supporting ministries beyond tithing and giving offerings in church still is. So this was a big loss and it did hit hard. Yet thanks to faith in the God whose call I heard, and not the partner whose money I would thankfully live on, I’ve stuck with the call.

Those experiences should make a good resume of faith for me, you’d think. Fortunately, no. I recently had an experience that showed me how far I am from possessing that faith my ‘lost and found’ girlfriend calls crazy. So this friend Carol, almost completing some mission school in Ukunda at the time (I’d easily turn the ocean and madafu into my ministry if I were her) tells me of this mission they had been to. Apparently, the school sent them away only with fare enough to get them to the field. How to survive there and go back? By faith! A Faith Mission they call it.

It was unbelievable how my anger flared up immediately I heard that. She could probably hear me shout despite the fact we were WhatsApping. I couldn’t understand why anyone would apply the Bible that literally and put others at avoidable risks. Would you honestly send a team out to a place they’ve never been to with completely nothing, because Jesus sent out His disciples and told them to carry nothing? At another time He told them to take a purse and a sword with them. How about we interpret and apply scripture in totality and not in isolations? We cannot go walking around naked because God told Isaiah to walk naked for three years for example, can we? Aren’t we supposed to find the principle behind that event and apply it appropriately in our context? That’s what I thought!

Just then Carol chilled me down, saying she actually found it interesting and was glad to have done it. She said God came through in such miraculous ways He probably wouldn’t have if they were sufficiently endowed. That her faith had been built and she had been reminded of her early years as a Christian. She would trust God without trying to find logic in the things He’d say. Years when she had faith like a child’s. You have no idea how quickly shame engulfed me. For some reason, I had lost that kind of faith and I could tell it. My trusting had gotten more calculated than innocent.

We all have moments we find ourselves in a place like that. The Christian life can sometimes feel like walking on the edge. You know how you could be busy loving on sinners and end up slipping to approving their sin? Such was how I got myself to losing that baby kind of faith. I grew love for God’s word so much while failing to watch against losing its literal relevance. I have loved some of the interpretations God has graciously given me of His Word. But with an attempt to make things that were recorded several centuries ago to fit my context today, I have lost the realness of some, if not most of them.

I find it hard, as I know most would, to imagine that we could part the seas with a staff in our hands or call down fire from heaven like Elijah did. If a lame person appeared in a church service today, I doubt if many will dare praying him to walk as opposed to wishing they’d serve him in his lameness; maybe buy him a better wheel chair or something. Don’t we always look with pity to those who dare pray the dead back to life? I know I’ve said in previous posts that miracles don’t just happen purposelessly outside of God’s will and cautioned against exalting them so that we become susceptible to deception. However, I think our coyness towards them has a lot to do with our little faith.

We can become so rational that we miss out on experiencing God’s power. If those miracles in the Bible truly happened, and I know they did, then we can experience them and even more today. Here is why; the God who did them hasn’t changed. I’d rather a miracle didn’t happen because God didn’t will it than because I didn’t believe. I love how David Pawson in his four-part sermon Normal Christian Birth asks his audience “when did you last believe?” It startles to think about how our comfortable lives have robbed us countless opportunities to grow our faith.

You don’t pray to get a matatu to the CBD, do you? Would you really need to trust hard for this month’s provision when you’ve already received your salary and planned so well how it will take you through the month? WHEN LAST DID YOU BELIEVE? Maybe we don’t get confronted by many highlight worthy opportunities to show faith. We still can turn every moment and bit of our lives into an opportunity to show faith and give glory to God. We can thankfully trust for that meal even when we know we have the money to buy it. It doesn’t have to wait till when we are broke.

If we can act in obedience in everything, then our faith will show in everything. I don’t think there’s any instance in the world where the Lord hasn’t required obedience of a Christian. So faith must show in everything. Those guys up the Hebrews Hall of Faith are there because they showed a consistent faith and not just some flashes of it. They are not celebrated because of a few standout events, but for a lifetime of faith. I always want to be like them because I desperately long to please Him whom they pleased. So I’ll gladly keep living on support for as long as the Lord pleases. Maybe it’s the only way I get to be as helpless as a baby so I can keep trusting like a baby.

Back to basketball; I’m rooting for the Cavs to win it all in June against arguably the most perfect of teams that has ever existed; Curry led Golden State Warriors. Maybe that crazy faith has started showing huh? I can only hope it pays.