Quiet Faith

Taking the long look.  Not always something I am good at.  Living not in light of how I feel or what I see, but what I know to be true.  I have been waging this war in my heart recently and in His always timely fashion, God pointed me to look at the lives of several OT women this week as examples of what it really means to live by faith. 

Noah’s wife.  Can you even imagine?  Her husband was named as the ONLY righteous man on earth at that time in history……….. I can’t even imagine what that must have looked like.  Then God speaks to him and tell his to build a boat for the pending flood.  Of course no one had ever seen a boat or rain or even knew what a flood was.  And this was not a tiny undertaking, it was massive with super specific instructions, it had to be able to hold the animals of the world, the entire future of living things.  It took him about 120 years to complete.  120 years…….  We have no indication that Noah’s wife ever heard the voice of God.  So for all we know she had to trust that her husband had indeed heard the voice of Almighty God (about whom very little was known and in whom NO ONE ELSE believed) and that he was not in fact crazy.  Then she watched him build that boat for the next 120 years along with her 3 sons.  While they built I can only imagine what she was thinking.  We have no idea of course as she individually is not really described in scripture.  We know almost nothing about her.  Except that she was there, and she stayed.  She stuck it out.  Whatever her specific role was, she didn’t run away from it.  That in itself, tells us quite a bit about the woman she must have been.  In the end, she in effect, became the new Eve, the literal mother of all living people.  She obviously didn’t have much of a support system.  There was no one else outside of her husband, her sons, and their wives who made it on the boat.  So she must not have had any fellow cheerleaders who supported her on this crazy journey of faith.  There must not have been anyone else who believed in what her husband was doing.  Stop for a minute and think about how lonely that must have been.  The entire rest of humanity thinking you were nuts.  It’s not like nobody noticed the massive boat being built for 100+ years.  As they prepared and waited for that flood, there was no way she could see what was coming, no way she could really understand what she was working for.  No reference point for her faith. If she had walked away, humanly I think we would all have been able to understand.  And somehow I’m sure God would still have worked out his plan.  But she didn’t, so instead of perishing with the rest of the very confused world, she survived in what must be one of the craziest (if not THE craziest) stories in history. And because she obeyed and got on that boat, she lived, and not just lived, but became a pivotal figure in human history.  We are ALL somehow related to HER.  That’s kind of amazing. 

Wow does that challenge my heart.  I am stopped by so much less.  Made silent by such less opposition.  Discontented by much less uncertainty.  Fearful of much smaller threats.  Tripped up by much less daunting obstacles. 

I doubt that her daily life was actually very amazing leading up to that flood.  It was probably very “normal”; the cooking, the cleaning, the caregiving, the working.  She probably didn’t feel very special most of the time.  In fact she very often must have felt like an oddity, a misfit, or a curiosity.  I can relate to that.  Many times when I meet someone new they will express a bit of awe that I live in a foreign country and raise my family there.  They will express in some way the sentiment that I must be somehow very strong, amazing, adventurous, or faith filled.  These people also generally feel that my life must be very romantic and exotic.   I smile inwardly to myself and try to communicate that while life in a foreign country certainly is challenging, I am most definitely not very brave, adventurous, or faith filled.  In fact I am quite ordinary.  I struggle with all the same things that everyone else does, the highs and the lows of being human.  Very often my days don’t look so different from yours either.  I cook and clean, take care of my family, go to work, try to make time for friends, and live life with my local body of believers.  None of that is super special in and of itself. 

But like Noah’s wife, I am not in this for the short term.  I’ve cashed in all my chips on this belief and I’m in this for the long haul.  So whether my days are mundane and lonely, sweet and full, tragic and terrible, or wild and wonderful, I still just need to obey. Not because I think it’s going to make things easier for me anytime soon (probably quite the opposite), but because I have faith that God is doing something big, something that I want to be a part of.  Occasionally I catch glimpses of what He is doing.  Mostly I have no idea.  But I know how it ends, and I believe that it’s worth waiting for.  I want to still be standing here when the roll is called.  I want to have played my part no matter how small it may be.  So I’m grateful for the reminder of women who have gone before me that learned how to live: quietly, simply, and faithfully.  I want to be like that.