Just a little faith

By Keith Williamson Special to the Sentinel

I have to admit of r e c e n t l y g o i n g t h r o u g h some difficult times. I read this and it helped me. My prayer is that it will help you as well.

If only I had more faith, I'd be able to handle myself in this situation. How much faith is enough in our mourning? Some of us feel that it is always more than we have. Jesus said that the amount of faith isn t important: I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall be removed; and nothing shall be impossible unto you (Matthew 17:20).

A grain of mustard seed! Do you recall how small a mustard seed is? Necklaces used to be worn with a mustard seed in the bulb, which magnified it so that it could be seen with normal eyesight. Now if we have faith, though it be that small, nothing will be impossible.

I interpret faith in this instance as basic trust. We don't need a huge quantity of it to get on with our bereavement. In fact, if we worry about having a lot of faith, we may miss the mustard seed we do have.

The giver of this grain of faith is God, whose Son, though despondent and despairing in his crisis, maintained his faith. He went through his Gethsemane of grief with the word Father still on his lips.

We too can go through the valleys and mountains of our bereavement journey with Father on our lips. Our hearts may wonder, doubt and cry out in pain, but these feelings will not obliterate our faith. Even when we think we have lost that mustard seed, we do well to remember that our Father is faithful, for he has loved us first. *

*Taken from When a Loved One Dies by Phillip W. Williams. Copyright 1976 by Augsburg Publishing House. Used by permission in the NIV Men's Devotional Bible. (Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 1993) p.1034.