Faith Maps

I started working on the idea of Faith Maps in 2015. When I started, I thought about faith as something that you either possessed or did not. I didn’t think of it as something that grows. So my thought process was very different in the beginning.

I started out thinking that you simply needed to have faith for God to accomplish an objective. I knew it needed to be within God’s will-whatever said desire was, but if it was in God’s will then I thought that it was faith that was the defining factor. If you believed you would gain said objective, but if you failed to have faith then you would not. The thing about this way of thinking is it didn’t account for a season that God may want you to walk where the answer is in the end not what you were expecting. I couldn’t actually fathom that scenario. My thought process was if God wanted you to accomplish __________ that He would help you walk toward it, and if He didn’t He would help you see the answer is no, and you should walk away.

So my plan when I started Faith Maps was to chart people’s stories. Men and women from the Bible, people that I knew, and even my own experiences to see how they went from A-Z to gain their objects of faith. I started with the idea of David. When he went out to face Goliath, he went armed in the knowledge that God had helped him succeed in impossible scenarios before. As a shepherd, he had killed both a lion and a bear, and when he came before King Saul he was able to tell what he had done so the king would let him go face Goliath. It acted on multiple levels. Faith for David, but also credibility to those he needed to convince to let him try in the first place.

I thought if I strung enough of those stories together, faith would be a simpler process, and every time we came across a situation we felt ill-equipped for, we could just look to the times the Lord had helped in the past and gain the courage we needed to tackle whatever we came up against.

What I didn’t know then was that faith is a testing ground. It’s something that increases in intensity the deeper in we go. There are seasons especially as we are starting out that God proves faithful almost immediately. Things that show to us that we are going in the right direction. But the bigger the challenge, the more it is designed to be outside our ability to “achieve.” It’s something we then have to learn how to depend upon the Lord for deliverance-not on the strength of our faithfulness, but on the strength of His.

I used to take a story like Moses and the Red Sea Crossing and marvel at the faithfulness of God, and I would wonder how the Israelites could have so much doubt in the moments leading up to the parting of the sea after having seen so much. But I never took into account the intensity of their struggle of the moment they were in. How they were facing their greatest fears seeming to come to life in that moment.

So now when I think about faith, it’s less about my ability to bring said thing about and more about trusting God to lead the way. I’ve also been through a season where what I thought He was going to bring about, He actually did not. So I’ve also learned that sometimes, what God is doing in a certain season is not as much about the physical as it is about how He is developing me as a person. I don’t believe this negates the faithfulness of God, but it definitely leaves a lot of questions.

Today Faith Maps still focuses on the things that God has done in the past that give me hope He will hear me here. But it also delves into the fears associated with walking by faith. This isn’t done by just digging deep and becoming more self-reliant. It’s overcome as we bring these fears and set them at the feet of the Lord. He is very good at treating you with respect as you honestly bring your worries and cares before Him. He is patient, and His love has exceeded every boundary I have set for Him. He has a standard that He is calling us to adhere to, but He does not expect us to get our hearts right on our own strength. The more I have brought before Him the more He has set right in my understanding about Him, myself, and the world around me.

So join me on this journey as we explore together the faithfulness of God through the ups and downs of life. I definitely don’t have all the answers, but the farther I travel this road with the Lord, the more He reveals. He draws me into the goodness of His heart. He comforts, protects, restores and redeems. And one day, He will deliver.