The Story of Faith
Well, I’m back. It’s taken me a long time, but I hope to once more entreat you to come and join me for monthly blog posts, little stories, updates on what I’m working on, and all things faith and fiction. Today’s offering is perhaps the beginnings of a story. I’m not sure where it can go just yet. Let me know what you think.
Once upon a time, a girl used her imagination. She wielded this tool of great weight with the force of optimism and chance. One cannot have enough of either. But what we call chance is better seen in reality as the will of our Father. Optimism’s less known name is faith. And Faith was her name, called out of her spirit at birth. Perhaps the choice of name was also a mix of chance and optimism on behalf of her parents. For no one is exempt from such things.
Curiously, people don’t seem to notice it, often misnaming it or confusing reality with their own desires. This is the sad result of mankind falling so far from grace. Hearts get hardened and even when a person attempts basic goodness and morality, the inner corruption is too strong and manifests in individual perversion. It is manifold selfishness set to cover the earth black, seething ills we do see, only to tolerate and explain and grow to clasp as the essential parts of ourselves. Such is the state every newborn child enters the world, shiny and eager, but already failed. What sorrow, what lack, what mishap. Such even is our Faith.
She had one advantage, however, apart from the imagination that overwhelmed her senses daily. Her parents believed. They were of the order of those who lay down their rights, tentative holds on reality, and deep resentment at not being their own master. The name of this illustrious order? The Restored. A secret society? Never. Their only goals and desires were to reveal truth, seek out love, and be restorers. All knew their names; all knew their ways. All either joined or resented their presence. For unless the Father calls and a person yields, resentment is the only way to respond to a truth that reveals one’s own wrongness. Wrongness that festers and longs to devour unsuspecting victims by presenting itself as good.
We do not decide good. And that is the relief of the Restored and the bane of everyone else. Alas, the Restored are grieved, as is the Father. Being born to those of the Restored gives the glory of what is at the tender ages that can accept it. Their brokenness hasn’t created years of false beliefs, the evil of those suffering has not forged cracks of pain to distort beautiful, receptive hearts of innocence.
So Faith grows, fostering the love of restoration, humility gaining precedence, her physical growth matched only by the spiritual knowledge that springs into being when the Father is known and glorified.
She is free, little skirts twirling as she races in the woods, barefoot, the tough callouses of her feet the only hard part of her. Unless one were to count her determination to seek out the possibilities around her.
She wears green more often than not, blending in with the grass and leaves she spends all her time associating with. Her hair, so light as to seem to belong to a woman of much more elderly age, glitters in the sun or the rain. An elfin sprite, a curious thing, misfit amongst rationality, but firmly rooted in the importance of life. She seeks the woods because the woods showcase the glory of the Father. She learns there, learns to commune with Him, forging connection, understanding how to grow – grow in repentance and grace – as the flowers themselves grow. Her character is formed by her name and she follows its example with discipline steeped in all the creativity of personality. For the Father can be seen in the mosaic of His creation, the shard of unique glass He put in each person sparkling if they will only let Him polish it daily. Such was Faith.
Her fantasy world of the wood was less whimsical than you might think. For one can never be lost in fantasy when one’s identity is based on the Father’s Word. What she imagined was a world where everyone was Restored, living in the fullness available to them. The strategies of her dreams were tests, concrete steps in a plan older than the ages and executed in faith, by the Faith who roamed and dreamed. She conjured words and conversations, actions and gifts, songs and stories, charities and education. It all lived in her, forming and growing, waiting for the proper time. The time of the Father.
Did she fully understand all of this? No. No one ever does in the learning era. She only knows to be obedient in each day, each hour, down to the minute. Always and completely? No, that is impossible for those fallen, even those Restored. But after each failure is more realization and repentance. That is the True Way. The Way which inspires hope that all of the false identities forged in fear and deception can never duplicate. They give only the appearance of joy – the dimmest light. One might think eventually those glimmers would grow stronger, or at least point toward a clearer path, but that never occurs. One must renounce them before the fog of the soul can become clear.
Faith practices the Way and grows to womanhood in its tutelage, desiring change and peace, seeking to enact the glories she sees in her soul to completion. Let her, won’t you?
