June 24, 2012
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That Mustard-Seed-Faith Thing
Originally posted June 21, 2012.
Recently, a friend of mine – we’ll call her “Hester” (she’ll kill me for such a name change, but I do have a good reason for it [*] LOL) – texted me and asked a very rare sort of question.“Hey, you’re the Bible whiz. Do you have any idea where the mustard seed faith thing is?”
I responded back after doing a quick search through the Bible.
“There are a couple, at least: Luke 17:5-10 and Matthew 17:14-20.” I added, “I gave you references to the entire passages – not just the single mustard-seed-faith verses – so you can see the verses in their full context. But not too worry, the passages are very short. And the contexts are not ultra-deep to understand at a glance.”
You, as the reader of my story here, might wonder why I didn’t edit that addition out. It is important because my friend and I have a long history together. A great deal of my friendship with Hester has included some pretty intense arguments about Biblical stuff and the choices she has made in her life…we’re virtually siblings in that sense, and we play our roles to an Oscar-worthy performance. To be sure, my own faults include getting too wordy and preacher-like with her when she’s not yet ready to process such things.
Hester is generally hesitant to entertain anything related to God. Despite all my encouragements and explanations, she still has a difficult time believing that God actually cares. And that is understandable, given the very pain-ridden life she has lived. This pain has become a regular part of her life so much that she almost embraces it because it is so familiar to her. Safer to stay with what you know than risk even more pain, she figures. (Many people are like that.)
While I have definitely not been the best example of a Christian brother, Hester knows that will not abandon her and our friendship. Even as she has a lot to learn about God’s love, I, too, have a lot to learn in how to share it with her. Our friendship has been a mutual experience in personal growth. That commitment means a lot to her, as trust is not something she easily gives. She knows she can trust me, yet it is a very difficult thing to do because the memories of loss and criticism and abuse still haunt her.
Like anyone who has suffered as my friend, the common question arises, “If God loves me, where is He? Why is this happening to me?” I sigh a sad sigh because I have no easy answer. I can speak of general things - good things – that can come from such a painful life, but it doesn’t ease away the throbbing in her heart. This has left a huge, deep wound in her spirit, to say the least. A wound that can only be healed by God, but she is so on edge at the mention of God.
All that said, hopefully it makes sense now why this unexpected text was such a joy to receive.
With that knowledge, I can now share the following. It’s a small step in the process of her heart being healed and finding the confidence to open up again, but it’s a miracle, all the same. Hester may roll her eyes at me because of the big deal I’m making of this whole instance…*chuckles*…but she has truly come a long way during the many years I’ve known her.
She emailed me with this explanation for her original text…
“Ok. It started Sunday. I had to get out of the house, so I took my dog up to the dog park. I got there and no one else was around, which was fine for me. [I] wasn’t really in the mood to be around people, so I was throwing the ball for my dog and listening to my iPod…songs that my dad liked and that reminded me of him. I wasn’t paying attention that a guy was bringing his dog into the area. I also wasn’t paying attention that I was singing out loud, too. Well, I was a li’l teary eyed and had some tears on my face as the guy came up to me he said hi and asked if my dog was friendly. I told him yeah, she’s a really friendly dog, likes other dogs and loves people.
“He went to go play with both dogs, which was fine with me, I was just there killing time anyways. Well, [when] he eventually came to sit down by me, he asked me if I was ok. I told him I was, just that Father’s Day tends to get me. He understood since his dad passed away when he was a kid. We got to talking, [and] he was really easy to talk to and I figured I would never see him again, since I don’t go to the dog park very often. Told him that I kinda lost faith in everything after my dad passed away. Kinda that everything went to hell and hand basket. He said he understood, but that I must have had some faith, even just a li’l bit, to make it in this world and survive. I just shook my head and said my normal ‘whatever’. [Then I] told him that it was nice talking to him and that I had to go.
“Well I ended up going back to the dog park because a family member that I don’t get along with was coming over to talk to Mom. So to just avoid them I took…my dog to the dog park…it was still cool enough to go. So when I got there that same guy was there but he was just getting ready to leave. He said hi, asked how I was doing and said he was running late or he would stay. So after about an hour I decided it was safe to [go] home. I got to my car and there was a necklace that had a li’l charm on it – a mustard seed in-between two pieces of glass. There was a note with it, saying, “[I'm] glad I got to see you again. Even a li’l faith is good, faith can be as small as a mustard seed and it will work for you.” I was confused all the way home, ’til I remembered that there was something about a mustard seed in the Bible. [I] just had no clue where and have no clue where any of the Bibles are in the house. So [I] got smart and thought about you…the Bible whiz.
Figure if anyone had any clue you would.”There’s no telling where this event will lead. God is certainly in control right now. Thinking over this recent event, I found several verses in light of Hester’s experience.
One is Jeremiah 29:13. This verse comes right after the well-known Jeremiah 29:11 (“For I know the plans I have for you…”). Little do many people know, verse 13 is given during a time of punishment and disaster for the nation of Israel. God’s people had long been living sinful lives, absolutely disgusting in the eyes of God, even mocking Him. Finally, God saw that they would not repent, so He punished them with death or exile and slavery at the hands of the Babylonians. However, God promised that this captivity would last only 70 years. (TRIVIA: The number 7 and its multiples is often a representation of completeness or perfection in Biblical terms.) That was to give them hope (see verses 10 and 11).
Then God proclaims to the scattered people of Israel that during those days in slavery, “…You will pray, and I will listen” (verse 12). God doesn’t stop there, though. He adds, “If you look for Me wholeheartedly, you will find Me” (verse 13).
Sound familiar? Like something Jesus said years later?
God expands on His promise of grace and mercy, “I will be found by you. I will end your captivity and restore your fortunes. I will gather you out of the nations where I sent you and will bring you home again to your own land” (verse 14).
For the people of Israel, this had to take a lot of faith to believe in. All that most of those people knew at that time were calamity, pain, shame, fear…where was there room for hope? I can assure you that my friend, Hester, struggles to believe anything good can come to her. And seventy years? That was pretty much an entire generation that would live and die in Babylon. And for those born in captivity, slavery would be all they knew, so to think of anything like freedom must have felt like a pipe dream.
Could anything really change? I wouldn’t doubt that many people felt like my friend, Hester. Change was either a silly idea or far more frightful than the pain they already endured. To put their faith in a promise God made many years before was a very risky thing to them.
Jesus said, though, that even faith – which Paul describes as the hope not yet come to pass, but is assured to come nonetheless (it’s not just wishful thinking) – as small as a mustard seed can move mountains. For those not familiar with agriculture, a mustard seed is an incredibly tiny little seed, one of the smallest in the world. But they grow very, very tall. God was telling His children to not lose hope, even if it’s tiny and seemingly insignificant. That hope would allow His people to endure the trials of slavery and the onset of despair in light of their exile while in a land that was certainly not home.
Similarly, Jesus said this of prayer (and why does anyone pray unless they have even a sliver of faith that their prayer will be heard and responded to?), “Keep on asking, and you will receive what you ask for. Keep on seeking, and you will find. Keep on knocking, and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives. Everyone who seeks, finds. And to everyone who knocks, the door will be opened” (Matthew 7:7-8, NLT).
Unlike in the events in the book of Jeremiah, God does not always tell us when the fruits of our faith will finally start to take shape to the point where we can harvest and enjoy them. Here, though, Jesus assures us that such a time will certainly come. We must persevere, however. We must, as the old saying goes, keep the faith.
In the book of Proverbs, wisdom is personified as a living entity, a woman, precious and desirable. We know from the rest of Scripture that God, Himself, is all-wise and those who seek God’s truth become truly wise. In Proverbs 8:17, “Wisdom” speaks, saying, “I love all who love me. Those who search will surely find me.”
Hester, at first, couldn’t place why the whole mustard-seed-faith thing sounded so familiar. She kept rolling it around in her head, though, and finally remembered there’s a reference to it in the Bible. Thus why she messaged me, because she knew I’m much more familiar with the Bible’s contents. It was certainly a very simple search, one that did not require a lot of effort. It was an important search, though, for, after her friendly chat with that stranger, it prompted in her a desire to understand what it was this “weird” man was talking about. Thus, in her search, while she may not understand all the aspects of faith, wisdom, and prayer, and more, her search yielded the strengthening of wisdom (still, knowing her, she may not realize this is true, but it definitely is true). She kept searching, and she found the answer, just as Jesus promised.
The key to gaining wisdom is to seek understanding (another encouragement from Proverbs).
There is likely so much more I could say on this matter. So much I wish to celebrate in light of Hester’s story for her sake and also to share with you, my reader, especially if you, too, have experienced anything like what Hester has. A simple story like this one has a peculiar way of being the very large stone tossed into the lake. There’s no telling how far the ripples will go, or when it will reach you where you tread the waters. So, I share this story because I sense it holds great value to many others out there. Many, far and near, whom are in need of hope, who need to know their faith is not vain.
And do be sure to pass this story along. I can only toss so many stones into the one lake, and there are many lakes.
* The name “Hester” is derived from the book, “The Scarlet Letter”, in which the main character, Hester, is forced to wear an embroidered “A” on her clothing as punishment for her affair with an unknown man (who turns out to be the towns own minister). The story is centered on how she endured her shame and rose above it, even to the point where the community that condemned her long forgot what the “A” originally stood for and came to think it meant something better.
