On mustard seeds and mountains
For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.” (Matthew 17:20–21).
I remember feeling like a failure as a child. One small failure in a vast tapestry of failures, in fact. If this verse was true — and it had to be, since it was in the inerrant and literal Bible — then no one had any faith at all. If anyone had been able to pull off this geological miracle, we certainly would have heard about it on the news.
So here we were, an entire religion of failures. A faithless remnant.
It seeped into my ability to believe that any prayer would be answered. How should I expect healing for the sick if I couldn’t even muster (mustard?) the tiniest amount (a-mount?) of faith? (Sorry for the puns; jokes are my coping mechanism.)
Anyway, here I am. 43 years old. Total physical mountains moved: zero. But I think I stumbled onto a better understanding of that verse this week.
I’m in crisis. It’s a big one. Big enough that I don’t yet feel ready to talk about it publicly. All you need to know is that the likelihood of it ending well seems to be in the same range (ok that one was unintentional) as shifting the Rockies a few hundred feet westward. (I don’t have a fatal disease, don’t worry. I will be physically ok.)
But hopeless as it seems, here I am: continuing to pray, both for a miracle, and for the strength to go through it. Here I am, putting in hard work every day as if the best outcome — no matter how unlikely — is going to arrive one day. Balancing my “please, God” prayers with “even so, not my will but yours”.
Here I am, not giving up, even when that seems like the only logical response.
It feels like faith.
I thought about that mustard seed verse again this week, and I think I was interpreting it wrong this whole time. Faith isn’t a magic trick. It’s the willingness to wake up every morning, go get an armful of rocks and walk them a few hundred feet westward. It’s looking at the mountain, nodding solemnly, and swinging the pickaxe one more time. Doing it over and over again, when common sense would tell you to just find a smaller mountain. Or no mountain at all.
Faith without works is dead, right? Is it possible that the works are evidence of the faith? I think it might be.
Which would mean that faith isn’t a magic trick, but rather the little nuclear mustard seed that keeps you going in the face of long odds, long past the point where you really should have given up.
Anyway, I don’t know if this is an epiphany or a justification. Maybe I’m making excuses for a remnant of faithless failures. I don’t know if this mountain will get moved. But I’m hacking away. If a miracle is waiting on me to prove I believe, I’m certainly not going to be the one who is caught unaware and trying to make up for lost time.
Maybe I’ll strike gold and find that was the point the whole time. Maybe I’ll find contentment in the routine of swinging the pickaxe instead of chasing ghosts. I’m not sure how the story is going to end, but I know it won’t end with me giving up and walking away from the mountain. I’ve been at it for months now. I’m tired, but I’m getting stronger. Every day, I’m a little more determined.
Which is kind of a surprise, even to myself.