Faith is rather like crossing the ocean. Before you gear up for the voyage, you must tease out the provisions and funds necessary and men hardy or perhaps foolhardy enough for such an endeavor. Any number of things can go wrong from the outset, and soon the safe shore on which you have tread for your entire life passes behind you beyond the known horizon. For weeks you see nothing but where the ocean meets the horizon, perfect and empty, the only constant. At some point, you wonder if you’re still in motion although the wind still fills your sails and the waves still rock the vessel. You live in the grip of fear- fear of storms, fear of sickness, and fear of the immensity, so you must drive that fear deep into your belly, study your compass, pray for a fair wind, and hope.
At first it’s no more than a haze on the horizon, so you watch. You watch intently. Then there’s a smudge, a shadow on the water that captures and holds your attention to the expense of any other image that meets your sight. For the first day, for the next, the stain slowly spreads along the horizon, taking form until on the third day you let yourself believe and dare to whisper the word- ‘Land’. It is Land, Life, Resurrection, a true adventure, coming out of the vast unknown, out of the immensity into new life. That is the New World, the World of Faith, and it discovers you, who you are, what you really believe, and what really matters to you. It asks you to hold on, past the point where all others turn back for fear of falling off the precipitous edge of the earth and losing everything because it offers you everything you risk and more than you could ever imagine as increase. Even then, far after the point where others turn back, it asks you to forge ahead, searching for the horizon, hoping it really will come.
This is why the scriptures tell us that many are called but few are chosen. It takes less courage to put to sea than to cross an ocean. At that breaking point, when the water fails, the food spoils and the plague threatens to undermine your physical and spiritual health, most men heed the mutinous rancor of those who ostensibly were their biggest backers. They will, ostensibly for your good while rather far more for their own, demand you call off the foolish venture and turn back to safer shores. They know the stories of More, Columbus, Armstrong, and others who have boldly gone where no man had gone before, but they do not believe that it could be them or you. It is more comfortable if the pains are endured by strangers.
It is possible that you are wrong. It is possible that you will fail. A wise man once told me that if your only reason to fear something is that it might happen, dismiss the fear. Who knows what will happen? Who knows but that you will land in a brave, new world and find wisdom and great treasures of knowledge, hidden for millennia from all those who choose the comfort and tranquility of the familiar over the animating contest of exploration. Some of the greatest stories arise from those who have run where the brave dare not go. Dare to dream. Dare to discover. Dare to hope. Set sail in faith, and you may find your own landfall on a distant, green shore.
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