Daily Presence预览

One Saturday afternoon, our church gathered at a community park for a church-wide picnic and softball game. After I got home and started changing clothes, though, I couldn’t find my keys. As I frantically rummaged through the shorts I wore that afternoon, I discovered a hole in the left pocket. Uh-oh! These were the very most important keys, the keys I needed every day at home and at work!

Immediately, I drove back to the park to retrace my steps from the afternoon, hoping against hope to get lucky. I also remembered to say a prayer for God’s help in finding the keys, although I confess that I feared the worst.

I arrived and approached the park, assuming I’d have to walk over two or three acres of parking lot and playing field to do a thorough search. But immediately upon entering the field, I spotted the prize, resting on the turf in plain view by the on-deck circle, seeming to smile at me. The keys! Immediately, I remembered the prayer. I thanked God, and the next morning in my Sunday School class, I even shared the experience as a testimony to prayer.

The question that came after that day is this: Why are we sometimes timid about faith? I even wondered if God had really answered my prayer, or would I have found the keys on my own had I not prayed? Shame on such pride!

In this experience, on reflection, I relate to the woman with the medical problem that Jesus healed in Mark 5. She unquestionably had faith, but she still approached Jesus timidly, trying inconspicuously to sneak up behind him so he wouldn’t notice her. Expositor Alexander McLaren wrote this about the woman’s timidity: ”We have here [a] great lesson, that very imperfect faith may be genuine faith.”

That statement made me feel a lot better about my key episode, because like the woman in Mark, my faith had been imperfect. God could have told me, “Ha, if your faith is that shaky, you don’t need my help. Go find your keys!” But no, rather than turn away, the heavenly father acted to perfect the imperfect, to find my wavering faith genuine in spite of my timidity.

We must thank God that for all that we are not, he is!