A Walk by Faith

A walk by faith is probably one of the most difficult tasks we, as humans, are asked to do. I frequently like to use the analogy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, when Bilbo Baggins is in the Lonely Mountain and can see absolutely nothing. It’s a blind walk, with evil lurking in every corner. Now bring it through a new lens, and suddenly it’s the very earth we on which we walk.

As a young adult, the walk by faith can be particularly challenging, and I can start to imagine why it is that we all start to feel despair creep into our hearts. It’s like playing “riddles in the dark” with God sometimes as we pray and try and listen. Discernment becomes a regular habit, or at least the attempt to discern does. The problem is that in order to walk blindly, we literally have to take God’s extended hand, and leap, trusting that He’s going to catch us. In a society that is riveting with a self-motivated and self-centered mentality, trust is something that the human being is more frequently withholding rather than giving. It’s becoming more and more hardwired into our very brains to distrust everyone until proven trustworthy. Then we are faced with the concept of having to trust in the very God we cannot physically even see save for in the Eucharist which still appears as bread. It’s a game of trust, and we lack it tremendously because we compare our perfect God to the imperfect human. We cannot imagine perfection, so we bring God down to imperfection in our musings.

Hence, we start to feel despair. Questions like “Is God actually going to answer me?” “Does God exist?” “Does anything I do even matter anymore?” start to play on a person’s mind as the Devil creeps into the darkest fears of loneliness. There is a quote in C.S. Lewis’ novel, Till We Have Faces that speaks true to society even today, “Love cannot live where there is no trust.” Now, while that quote can apply to literally so many situations in today’s world, mainly in this, it’s really quite an ironic statement given that God is Love. So really, if that quote is taken apart, the general picture is that God cannot live within us if we have no trust. Our walk of faith has to be characterized by trust in Him, by our Love. His Love thrives most in us when we really surrender our hearts, bodies, actions, beings to Him.

A walk by faith is really an invite to let God use us and foster our love in Him and His Love in us, and no Love is worth having without the trust of having to jump into the deep unknown. Trust is love, Love is God. Let us ask that we might have help in the pursuit of Christ, following Him out onto the water like Peter. St. Peter, Pray for us. Jesus I trust in You!