There is a Persian proverb that I really like and have been thinking about a great deal lately - "Go as far as you can see, and when you get there, you'll see further."
~Persian proverb
It's a good little saying for someone who likes to know how something (whether it's a project, relationship, or some kind of goal) is going to turn out before I put my time, heart, and energy into it. For example, at work, it's time for me sign a contract saying I'll stay here for another year and the very idea of it overwhelms me. I look at that year in the future and wonder, how on earth am I going to accomplish the goals I have for my department? How am I going to get another round of students through complex chemical equations? And when I think about how I can't quite answer any of those questions yet, I become afraid to try. It's the same way with new relationships. You meet someone new at work and you could put effort into making friends with them...but what if the friendship doesn't last? What if it crashes and burns? Should you just avoid the awkwardness by not befriending the person at all? The same situation can be extended to dating, of course. It is so easy for me to look at something and want to know exactly how it's going to pan out before I put my heart into it. The problem, of course, is that there's no way for me to know exactly how I'm going to build a stronger science program in my school successfully. I can't know exactly how a new relationship is going to work or turn out. That's where the proverb comes in. All I can do is act on what I feel is best and hope that when I get to a certain point, I will see what direction to go from there. It's like working a puzzle. You pour all the pieces onto a table and then you have a choice to make at that point. Sure, you can try to stare each and every piece down, calculating where all the pieces go and work the puzzle out entirely in your head before you even turn all the pieces over, but who does that? Instead, you have faith that when you put a couple of pieces together, you're going to start to find enough patterns or fractions of a picture that eventually, you're going to be able to add more and more pieces as you go until the big picture is finally complete.
Isn't that what faith is? In the movie Facing the Giants, I remember a custodian telling the coach a story about two vineyard keepers who were living in a drought. One farmer decided not to plant his crop until it rained and the other planted his crop anyway, so that it would be ready when rain came. Who had more faith? The answer is pretty obvious and the story makes so much sense, and is so applicable to every day situations in my life. There is a lot to risk when it comes to acting on faith, but if I concentrate on avoiding all risks that come my way, then I'm not letting God use me as a puzzle piece in his Big Picture. Will every one of my students learn the material and morals I try to instill in their minds every day? I don't know, but I can certainly plant the seeds and pray for God for grapes. Do I know that contacting someone I am interested in is going to result in awkward conversation or that friendship of a lifetime that I can't find anywhere else? Maybe not, but I can lay down the first puzzle piece and go from there.
I believe it was Martin Luther King, Jr. who said that faith isn't seeing the whole staircase, but rather taking the first step. Once you get there, God will tell you where to go. Moses didn't know how he was going to get all of his people out from under the Pharoah safely. He didn't have a detailed travel itenerary - God helped him cross seas and deserts as the people came to them. Mary and Joseph didn't know exactly how they their baby's life would get started - God opened stable doors and safe escape routes for them as they came to them. We are no different. If we sit and wait for God's plans for us to be explained in their miraculous entirety to us before we make any plan of action, we aren't showing faith. We'd be waiting out and wasting our entire lives.
Isn't that what faith is? In the movie Facing the Giants, I remember a custodian telling the coach a story about two vineyard keepers who were living in a drought. One farmer decided not to plant his crop until it rained and the other planted his crop anyway, so that it would be ready when rain came. Who had more faith? The answer is pretty obvious and the story makes so much sense, and is so applicable to every day situations in my life. There is a lot to risk when it comes to acting on faith, but if I concentrate on avoiding all risks that come my way, then I'm not letting God use me as a puzzle piece in his Big Picture. Will every one of my students learn the material and morals I try to instill in their minds every day? I don't know, but I can certainly plant the seeds and pray for God for grapes. Do I know that contacting someone I am interested in is going to result in awkward conversation or that friendship of a lifetime that I can't find anywhere else? Maybe not, but I can lay down the first puzzle piece and go from there.
I believe it was Martin Luther King, Jr. who said that faith isn't seeing the whole staircase, but rather taking the first step. Once you get there, God will tell you where to go. Moses didn't know how he was going to get all of his people out from under the Pharoah safely. He didn't have a detailed travel itenerary - God helped him cross seas and deserts as the people came to them. Mary and Joseph didn't know exactly how they their baby's life would get started - God opened stable doors and safe escape routes for them as they came to them. We are no different. If we sit and wait for God's plans for us to be explained in their miraculous entirety to us before we make any plan of action, we aren't showing faith. We'd be waiting out and wasting our entire lives.
So I leave a lot of quotations and proverbs mixed in with bible stories, metaphors and various analogies for you to think about this week.
Faith isn't working the whole puzzle at once. It's putting down the first piece.
Faith isn't working the whole puzzle at once. It's putting down the first piece.
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