Evidence | Previous Challenge Entry

how it works

TITLE: Evidence | Previous Challenge Entry
By Candace Miller
05/30/07
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“Pastor, I wish I had the faith you have.”
I wish I had the faith you think I have, thought the pastor behind the uncertain smile he gave his parishioner as they shook hands for the last time.
“We sure need your prayers,” he assured her.
Just days away from their departure date to move from the fulltime pastorate and the home they had known for the past eight years, and to move over a thousand miles away to a place he had never been, without promise of an income, the pastor knew that he did not even have enough money to get out of town let alone rent the truck they needed to move themselves to this new place of ministry.
“This is scary,” he had confided to a pastor friend.
“Just scary enough to be God,” agreed his friend.
While that was some comfort, it was not the concrete evidence he needed.
Later, as the family drove towards a campground in Indiana where they would meet both sets of grandparents for a family rendezvous that might not happen again for years, the pastor and his family found themselves singing the Scripture song they had recently learned at Bible camp. “If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you.”* Over and over they claimed that verse as they sang it on their journey. After all, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
Following the bittersweet time at the campground, the young family headed off to share for the first time the ministry God had given them with churches of like faith and purpose. They were looking for support, both prayer and financial. With only two such meetings, and one of them in a small rural Church, they could only hold out hope that God would show himself strong on there behalf and bestow upon them what they needed to make the trip. They were in awe when they returned home a week later, just in time to reserve their moving truck—with just enough money to rent it. Gas money would come later. And so began the greatest adventure of a lifetime—for a lifetime. The faith walk where, though they could not see with their physical eyes that which they hoped for, time and again God showed Himself faithful by providing the evidence of that which they could not see. Traveling about, raising support for themselves to plant churches and to aid the struggling Bible college they were affiliated with, there was always enough gas to get from point A to point B and so on. There was always something to eat, something nice to wear and somewhere safe and clean to sleep. It all began that day when that dear sister said, “Pastor, I wish I had the faith you have.”
“So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” As the songwriter so aptly noted, “Day by day and with each passing moment, strength I find, to meet life’s trials here. Trusting in my father’s wise bestowment, I’ve no cause to worry or to fear. He whose heart is kind beyond all measure, Gives unto each day what He deems best—Lovingly, its part of pain and pleasure. Mingling toil with peace and rest.”
What greater adventure could there be than to walk by faith and not by sight. As Jim Eliot concluded in his journal one day, “He is no fool to loose that which he cannot keep, to keep that which he cannot loose.” Faith. What an adventure!

*All Scripture references are from the Authorized Version (KJV).

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