Let me take you on a journey, mamma.
A mother. An eight year old son. A cancer diagnosis. Two and a half years of fighting. Watching her son endure horrific treatments with a smile on his sweet face.
And then. A bell. In a hallway. People cheering.
The faith. The hope. The outcome she had prayed for, for two and a half years, becoming the reality right in front of her. Two and a half years of praying every single night that her boy would ring that bell. And then her boy rang that bell.
Only that was not the end of the story.
The relapse came four months after the final pill.
Four months after the prayers, the hope, the faith, the waiting, the breath of relief. Four months of believing he had been cured. Four months of God answering her prayer.
And then at eleven years old, that same boy was diagnosed again.
That shakes a faith more than I can say in words.
It is a feeling deep in the pit of the soul. Like it was carved out with a spoon and thrown to the abyss to be devoured by the devil himself. Maybe a bit dramatic. But that day, five months ago, that is what it felt like.
Everything I had believed in. The prayer. The faith. My God. The juicing. The careful elimination of every food and oil and product that might have invited this beast in. None of it mattered. It still came back.
I lost my faith that day. In a hospital waiting room. Looking at the results of blood tests on a back-lit screen.
Maybe your story is different. But mamma, we all have a story where our faith is shaken or lost for a moment. Where we fall off the cliff we have been holding onto, and it feels like no one caught us.
But here is the part I have to tell you, because it is the truest thing I know.
That is not what actually happened.
God allowed me to fall.
Read that sentence again. Because most of us have been afraid to say it out loud. We have been taught to say God did not do this, the enemy did. And there is truth in that. But there is another truth, sitting right next to it in the Bible, that we have to be brave enough to look at.
He allowed it.
He allowed it so He could refine my faith.
"so that the proof of your faith, being more precious than gold which is perishable, even though tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ;"1 Peter 1:7
He was there the whole time. Just like a dad running behind the bike his child is learning to ride.
Faith is the bike. I am the child. God is the dad.
A dad does not pull the bike out from under his child. He runs alongside her. He lets the small falls happen, because the falls are how she learns to ride. And when the worst one comes, he is right there. Close enough to catch her before her head hits the pavement.
Sometimes we have to fall. Pick ourselves back up. Dust off our knees. And try again.
And here is the gift of it, mamma. I did not need a lot of faith to get back up on that bike.
I needed a tiny bit.
"And He said to them, 'Because of the littleness of your faith; for truly I say to you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, "Move from here to there," and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you.'"Matthew 17:20
A mustard seed. That is the size of the faith He is asking for. Not a mountain of it. A seed.
The mountain I was staring at looked like the Mariana trench, and I was sinking fast. And I thought my enemy was the cancer.
It was not.
My enemy was my shaken faith. My mind. My soul that had been so tired for so long. My wall.
That was the enemy.
The cancer is the fire. The wall is the enemy. The fire I cannot control. The wall I built brick by brick, and I am the only one who can take it down.
And I can rejoice, because God will take me out of the trench.
I only need to be willing to float.
"I will extol You, O Lord, for You have lifted me up, and have not let my enemies rejoice over me."Psalm 30:1
He has lifted me up.
Not pulled me back to the shallow water. Not put me back on solid ground. He has lifted me up, in the very middle of the deep, and not let the enemy I was fighting win.
So mamma, if your faith is shaken today, hear me.
You have not lost Him.
He let you fall on purpose, because He is refining you in a fire that is going to come out worth more than gold. He has been running behind your bike the whole time. He is not done with you. He is making you.
And you do not need a mountain of faith to get back up.
A seed will do.
Find one mustard-seed-sized piece of belief in you today. The one that says Lord, I do not understand, but I am still here. That is enough. That is the seed.
Hand it to Him.
And let Him lift you up.