Faith Through the Fear
Written by Shelby Waller
Shelby is a student missionary completing her mission training program's service requirements at the Nortons' Children's home in Thailand. She has been in Thailand for over a month and has written several blog posts on walkingredeemedtogether.com – a blog featuring posts from Kasey's daughters and the student missionaries at the Nortons' project.
She was standing there, a look of fear in her eyes. As I backed away and held out my hands, a smile broke through her worry, and she jumped.
The girls were climbing some stacked concrete cylinders this particular afternoon. Most of the children can climb to the second layer, if not even the top, so the ones who can't tend to feel left out. Sure enough, as I walked over to the girls, one little one turned around and motioned that she wanted to get up.
I try to have a rule that if you can climb it by yourself, you can climb, but I'm not going to help you, because if you climb up by yourself, then you should be able to get down by yourself. However, this time, I decided I could help the last two girls get up. They had lots of fun playing in the cylinders, being up with the other kids, and looking around from a greater height. But when it came to getting down, there was an issue. Through motions, the girls looked at me and explained that they wanted to get down. I remembered how fun it was to jump into my father's or mother's arms when I was young, so I decided I could do the same for them. The girls looked worried as I backed away, but when I smiled and held out my hands, I could see them get excited.
And then they jumped. They just jumped. There was no hesitation, no doubt that I saw flit across their faces; they just jumped.
As I thought more about this, I realized that maybe Someone else does this too. I think sometimes we find ourselves in situations where we have to trust God. We find that we are unable to do things on our own, and sometimes the scariest part is that we feel like God is far away. We feel like He is not listening or that He is distant.
But what if He had purposely moved away to give us a chance to trust Him?
To give us the excitement of jumping. Jumping can be fun, or it can be scary, depending on how we look at it. But either way, we have to jump. We can choose to step out in faith, excited for the adventure, or we can choose to step out in faith begrudgingly; but then, is that even faith?
As I look at my journey here, I see many points when I will need to trust God completely, especially with the visas. I can choose to dread that necessity for trust, or I can jump into it with excitement. I can tell you I'm going to try my best to jump with excitement, and I would encourage you to try to do the same.