"Lord, give me strength, a little patience is all I ask. Give me faith." I find myself praying this little prayer quite often during my daily routine. Whether it's the driver behind me who insists upon accelerating, knowing full well that I intend to make a turn, or clients who just "don't seem to get it," or people who continually seem to make the same mistakes over and over again. I am constantly praying for assistance to cope. We all share these same foibles and some of us can react to life's little aggravations better than others.
But we also live in chaotic times, in a broken world. I, like many, find myself whispering those same words every time I read the daily newspaper, turn on the television news or listen to the world report on the radio as I sit in daily traffic. We are bombarded on all sides with scenes of suffering, starvation, oppression, violence against our children and neighbors, and inhumanity in places like Gaza and the Ukraine - even on our own soil here at at home. There is a hunger in the human mind and heart for certainty in every aspect of life. We want to be safe. We want to be secure. We want to be able to do something to enable a change, a shift in the suffering that we experience.
We want to understand how the promise of God's love fits into all of this and we cry out like the disciples, "Lord, increase our faith." At times life can seem somewhat overwhelming. We can easily beg for more faith so that we can be the kind of disciples we believe Jesus is teaching us to be.
But Jesus shifts our attention away from thinking about quantity to considering the quality of the faith we already have. Faith, he implies, is not something that we can have more or less of. If we have faith the size of a mustard seed - the tiniest seed of all - we can move mountains. This is not a rebuke by Jesus, it is a gentle reminder of what we have already received as gift.
Faith, it seems, doesn't have to increase as much as exist. Having faith doesn't automatically give the believer the power to perform crowd-pleasing spectacles or life-saving miracles. But it does mean that we are in touch with God and experience God as the source of that energy which enables us to live good lives, marked by the ability to forgive as we ourselves have been forgiven, to reach out to one another as we ourselves have been found and embraced by God.
Our times call for a strong, courageous witness to the sacredness of life, of creation, of human dignity. We are called to witness to justice and peace and to our common brotherhood in the family of mankind. Having faith means confronting injustice with courage and crying out against the neglect of the poor and needy of our country and world whose interests get put aside during times of war, religious indifference and political upheaval.
Knowing myself, I'm sure I will continue to mutter my same little prayer tomorrow as I begin my day in stalled traffic. But if I"m lucky, I might remember that we are all far from perfect and are rather consistently plagued by failure and selfishness. We are much too easily hurt, too easily discouraged. We fall short of expectations. We display our frailty like open wounds.
Yet despite this, our faith will give us strength to live our lives freely in trust and in love, knowing that our God is near, that He understands our pain, that He will sustain us and carry us through even in the midst of our struggles and even though our faith may feel as small and insignificant as a mustard seed.
