“But that was only part of it. In truth I was a little scared, and preoccupied about where we’d go from here. For I had asked this of Dad the previous night, asked it straight out: Where do we go from August’s? He didn’t know. We’d simply go forth, he said, like the children of Israel when they packed up and cameled out of Egypt. He meant to encourage me. Juts like us, the Israelites hadn’t any idea where they’d end up! Just like us, they were traveling by faith! Indeed, it did impart a thrill, yet the trip thus far, in the frigid and torpid Plymouth, had reminded me what a hard time the chosen people actually had of it. Once traveling, it’s remarkable how quickly faith erodes. It starts to look like something else — ignorance, for example. Same thing happened to the Israelites. Sure it’s weak, but sometimes you’d rather just have a map.”
– Leif Enger, “Peace Like a River“
I find I can quite easily relate to this paragraph of prose, and maybe you can to.
“Once traveling, it’s remarkable how quickly faith erodes. It starts to look like something else — ignorance, for example.”
Or stupidity, or naivety… How foolish faith makes me look sometimes. How easy it is to say that I am wasting my costly education on the mission field, or, more broadly, my life. How easy it is to see faith as passive and callow instead of active and discerning.
“Sure it’s weak, but sometimes I’d rather just have a map.”
Or a paycheck, or a girlfriend…It’s easy to dwell on what I don’t have and worry about how I’m going to arrive at these things.
It’s better, though, to trust.
Paint Dry Sport (n) – Any sport that is about as exciting to watch as paint drying.
I arrived back in Vienna on August 9th, narrowly and thankfully avoiding the whole British liquid explosive situation. The summer was good, but busy, taking me across the Atlantic four times.
On my list of things to do today was to deposit some extra pounds into my bank account. No, not those pounds…British Pounds. It’s money. So I wait patiently in line and finally get to the counter and ask to change my British money to American money and deposit it in my account.