Dear Friends

While out walking one morning this week I was pondering a conversation I had had a few days earlier with a good friend.  It revolved around the New Testament definition of faith which you know well, “faith is the substance or things hoped for, and the evidence of things unseen”.  How do we portray these in terms that somebody can understand or enables them to get a handle on expectations of what faith is all about?

Two metaphors came to mind.  Firstly, I was walking in the dark before sunrise and half the sky was covered with clouds and the other half showing some stars.  Street lights don’t cover some of my route as we are on the edge of the country. Walking in the dark like this has an element of faith to it, for example, you expect the path to be clear and not to be falling into a hole, you don’t expect there to be trip wires across the road.  Extending this a little further – I have been on this route many times, so my faith has a certain solid foundation to it.  There is substance of things hoped for; there is evidence of things unseen because of previous experience. 

 However if I were to go walking in the dark around a route that was unfamiliar, the nature of faith would be a little different. The path has been mapped out and people have trodden there before,  but for myself the knowledge is not first hand and so I go in hope filled faith anticipating that the course will be safe and get me to my desired destination.  If it is completely unfamiliar with no map in hand then the risk element is stronger still, as I trust that there will be a path that will allow me to return rather than simply back track.

 The second metaphor I thought about came from the word “substance” and I began to think of fluids and milk in particular.  Milk has various forms and can be turned into various products.  Milk that we put on the table has two parts to it – there is a cream and there is the low fat stuff.  Cream is less dense, can be frothed up and is nice and tasty and some people like large doses of it. But too much is bad for you. The form of milk that has had most of the fat removed is much better for us and does a multiple of tasks that we enjoy on our food or in our coffee and so on.  However, you can refine milk further into a number of different products, one of which is casein that can become a very hard substance.  In times past casein was used to make the handles of table knives and buttons. The metaphor portrays that something that is very fluid, that can be very messy if spilt, through refining can become something that is useful in many ways.

 As we move through life with experience and working at our spiritual journey our faith has much more substance to it and changes its nature.  The frothiness and bubbliness of a new Christian in their new found faith does not yet have much experience and solidity but through time it changes so that the evidence of things unseen becomes stronger and built into the foundation. 

There is another aspect of milk also, if it is not used and sits around doing nothing, it soon becomes sour and has to be thrown out. The same with faith, we have to exercise it, put it to work so that it becomes useful to us and to others.  “Faith without works is dead!”