Present-Tense Faith
Present-Tense Faith
Have faith, Joni … one day it will all be better.”
I can’t tell you how many times I heard words like those from sad-faced friends who clung to the guardrail of my hospital bed when I was first injured.
“Have faith, Joni … faith will see you through to the end.”
Boy, that sounded morbid to me.
I could never be comforted by words like those. They always left me with a feeling that nothing much was really going to change. My paralysis was still to be a prison, and faith—a kind of hopeful, wistful longing—was only a religious warm fuzzy to cheer me until a faraway, future day when everything would “make sense.”
If being a woman of great faith meant sitting around in my wheelchair longing for pie in the sky, I wanted no part of it.
What a colossal misunderstanding!
Faith, as the Bible defines it, is present-tense action. It’s taking God’s promises and acting on them today. This “right now” way of looking at God’s assurances is the stuff of which great people of faith are made. They simply take God at His Word and live on that basis. To them, faith is pulled out of the abstract, out of the nebulous nowhere, out of the syrupy twilight, and lived with concrete certainty in the here and now.
Somewhere along the line I realized that. On some dark night in a sterile room the words of Hebrews 11:1 began to seep through my stubborn defenses. I began to realize that faith means being sure of what we hope for … now. It means knowing something is real, this moment, all around you, even when you don’t see it.
When I started living like this, I suddenly understood I could get a jump-start on heaven. I could start living for eternity today. I could have confidence that God had His busy fingers working on me moment by moment, even though I couldn’t see or feel them.
Great faith isn’t the ability to believe long and far into the misty future. It’s simply taking God at His word and taking the next step.