Crazy FaithSample

Crawl Before You Walk

What I’m going to say next might surprise you: You’ve got to crawl before you can walk. I know I’ve just been talking about crazy faith, but the thing is, we’ve got to start somewhere. No one walks into a gym for the first time in two years and jumps into bench-pressing three hundred pounds, and nobody jumps headfirst into a pool for the first time and expects to perform like an Olympic swimmer. 

The night I met my now-wife, Natalie, I didn’t get down on one knee, profess my undying love, and propose to her. She would have called me desperate! Instead, I took my time to get to know her, cracked a few jokes, spit some game, got the digits . . . you know, baby steps. 

Crazy faith is where you find yourself after you’re dedicated to exercising baby faith. But the truth is, most people who want to be great don’t want to do anything on a small scale. They want Moses-parting-the-Red-Sea types of results, but they don’t want to go back to Egypt and face their pasts. They want to be safe on a giant, sturdy boat in the middle of a flood, but they don’t want splinters from sanding down the wooden planks needed to build it. I imagine that for Noah, cutting down that first tree took a small measure of faith and a huge amount of humility that nobody saw except him and God. 

For you, baby faith might mean opening a bank account that you label Generosity Fund and depositing five dollars in it. Baby faith might look like filling out an application to enroll in an evening class at your local junior college. It might mean browsing your local furniture store and picking out the new sectional that you want to put in the living room of the new house you don’t yet own. Baby faith might mean writing a letter to that parent you haven’t spoken to in years. 

I believe that soon you’ll be sprinting forward in your faith, but you can’t run if you don’t learn to walk first. Walking in faith comes from crawling in faith. And it’s okay to crawl. 

Consider the area of your life that you identified yesterday as having the weakest faith foundation. What is one baby step of faith you can take to strengthen that foundation?