Phone a friend

or at least borrow their faith for a while

Sometimes our own faith isn’t quite enough to sustain us. If you’re newer to the faith, you might not have run into these situations yet. If you’ve lived a #blessed life where everything has worked out for you, you might think I’m making this up. But if you’ve lived through seasons of darkness—illness, despair, loss, grief, difficulty of whatever kind—you know the darkness can obscure your vision of even the closest things. Your hand in front of your face can be unfathomable.

Sometimes our own faith isn’t quite enough to sustain us. What this isn’t going to be is an argument that if you only had more faith, you’d get rid of your problems. It’s also not a diatribe against faith, claiming faith falls short of what we need. It is a reminder that we aren’t supposed to do doing this on our own. Scripture is communal and our life following Jesus is also communal. Sometimes our own faith isn’t enough to sustain us; we will need to borrow the faith of others.

The best way to borrow the faith of others is to start before you need it. Fill your heart with your own stories and the stories of others. They will be a rich well to help sustain you.

We see God in our own lives.

It is important that I write down how God is moving in my own life. I need to recall things that God has taught me. Ways that God has provided. I need to chronicle my own history with the Lord because there will be times that I am uncertain that God is moving. I may fear that God has left me. I may despair that He can move, that He will be present. In those times, I need to remind myself what He has already done.

In some way, chronicle your own journey. It makes sense for me, as a writer, to write about my journey. Maybe you leave yourself voice notes. Maybe you make videos. Maybe you draw pictures that remind you of certain times in your life. Plant a tree. Buy a mug. Make a scrapbook. Do something

We see God in the lives of our friends.

Sometimes though, even my own stories leave me unmoved. Then I need friends who will stand beside me and remind me of how God has been faithful to them. I need to see the work of God in the people around me. Often that is the ember of hope that God is still at work in my own life. We need to share our stories of faith. We need other believers in our lives.

If someone is new to the faith, this is especially important. They do not have their own history with God and they might need to borrow yours. Perhaps you already have a small group or a discipleship band, start there. Learn the stories of others and share your own. Perhaps this means, inviting a casual friend into a deeper relationship. The options are many. Perhaps ask the Spirit what your next step is.¹

We see God in the stories of His people.

God has been at work much longer than we have been alive. We know that rationally but sometimes we don’t live like that. We need past stories of God at work as well. The Bible is filled with the stories of people—people who were just like us, not heroes or idealistic models. We see God at work in the lives of those people, weaving His larger plan around and through their individual stories. God has been faithful, through generations to centuries, to His promises. We see God is at work even in the surrounding stories of Scripture. In our last post on Amos, we saw God’s mention of His work in the nations that were not part of Israel.

Here is my plug for knowing more church history. We see God at work in the lives of people throughout our stories of church history. We see the church live in horrible times and see be a witness for the kingdom. We see the church act in horrible ways and even though we are unfaithful, God is faithful. We see how God has been on the move over and over and over when we read or listen to more church history.

During a seminary class on women in church history, I realized that women have been advocating for their full inclusion in the church for centuries. I wrote this in a Instagram post in 2021.

Why Not Women was published in 2000. I finished reading it yesterday, twenty-one years later. In the past five to seven years, I’ve read a pile of books making essentially the same claims. (Side note: the book is excellent. You should read it.) Sometimes we think a viewpoint is new, only to find out that it’s not.

In 1666, Margaret Fell wrote a tract titled “Women’s Speaking: Justified, Proved, and Allowed of by the Scriptures...”

In 1710, Susanna Wesley held evening prayer services that swelled to over 200 people. Her husband, who was away, asked her to stop because his assistant was complaining. She said she wouldn’t stop without a positive command so that she would be absolved “from all guilt and punishment for neglecting this opportunity of doing good.”

In the early 1800s, Jarena Lee composed a biography that included her call to preach. She wrote, “If a man may preach, because the Savior died for him, why not the woman? seeing he died for her also. Is he not a whole Savior, instead of a half one?”

Sojourner Truth (1797-1883) gave public defense of her right as believer and a woman to proclaim the gospel.

Katharine Bushnell (1855-1946) defended a Scriptural position for women’s full participation in the church that remarkably resembles the same conviction many people hold today.

This isn’t to speak of the women in the desert movement or monasticism, the modern missionary movement composed largely of women (so many women were going to difficult and dangerous places that schools were begging men to go with them), or the women who helped start colleges to educate pastors/preachers and then weren’t awarded their own earned degrees. This is only a tiny outline over a few hundred years.

Since then many others (women and men) have repeated these same arguments. From the looks of it, we’ll have to continue doing this same work, every generation after the other. It is not that the scholarly work is not available but that we are not engaging with it. But imagine if we were able to put that time and energy into proclaiming the gospel and participating in the kingdom. What might happen then?

Knowing history means realizing that women’s full inclusion in the church is not a result of feminism. It also means that I can see God’s faithfulness to other women who have taught and pastored and led. Knowing God met them there helps me remember that God will meet me here in my own life. I am encouraged in my own calling by God’s faithfulness to them in their callings.

We need the faith of others to live faithfully. We will all encounter seasons of life in which we are struggling to see God. We will experience dark nights of the soul. And it will not be our independence or our strength that sustains us during those times. It will be the life of faith that weaves throughout all of our stories that helps carry us back into the light.

Receive the faith of others. Offer your faith to the people around you. Build memorials from the work that God has done in the lives before you.

1. I had to read exactly two sentences about Elissa Weichbrodt’s new book to preorder it.

2. These art tutorials are so fun!

3. Anxious People by Fredrik Backman. You’ve read this, right? If you haven’t, you should. I read it for book club and then couldn’t go to the meeting, but I would have loved to discuss this book.

1. It’s my goal to point us in certain directions with my writing. But I do not know enough about your life to give you specifics. That is for you to discern with the Spirit.