Faith:Everyday Faithfulness--Linden Malki

It is amazing how much faith we use every day. We never know everything about everything, and have to act on our best information and best available evidence. I got on a large aluminum tubular object in the belief that it would take me halfway around the world safely. We landed in a city that none of us had ever been in before, in faith that the arrangements that had been made were valid, that there was a warm and dry place for us to stay on a rainy evening. Dave and I drove halfway across Finland with the faith that what I had been told about my grandparents was true enough that we would find records of them and their ancestors. Dave, who had known very little about my mother's family, was excited to find a marriage record of the right names at the right time--and it included information that sent us through three days at the Provincial Archives office to the whole family, and to be able to drive around the area in which my grandfather's people had lived.
Our faith in God is like this--we will never know everything we want to know, but the more we seek Him, the more we learn of Him, and the more we see of His hand in our lives. We are not asked to believe anything that isn't true; but to use the understanding we do have to fill in the blanks. We realize that what we think we know may not be what we think; we found in our research that some of the information we thought we had was mistaken or incomplete. God does not always do what we want or expect; sometimes it takes a while to see what He was really doing in our lives.

As we visited churches in Finland and Estonia, some large and ornate, some small and traditional, we were in countries that had been directly influenced by Martin Luther. His spiritual breakthrough came with Romans 1:16-17, where St Paul writes that "the just shall live by faith." Paul here is quoting from the Old Testament prophet Habbakuk 2:4, which is often translated as "the righteous shall live by his faithfulness". This brings us to a place of not just believing, but actively being faithful to what we have been taught and what we have experienced in our relationship with God.