Growing Our Faith Through Obedience And Trust

A friend of mine recently asked me what I thought about the relationship between trust and obedience. At first the relationship seemed obvious…until it started looking complicated. That’s what you get for being prone to overthinking things.

Faith is one of those words that seems to have an obvious meaning. It really has many shades of meaning depending on context: the Faith, my faith, have faith. It’s a short word with enough meaning for something with three or four times the number of letters.

Faith – that is, personal faith – is a gift. At the same time, we are encouraged to grow our faith. One might be tempted to ask how we can make a gift larger. Is a gift not given as it is?

But that is a limited view of the nature of gifts. We can be given a plant; we can encourage it to grow or, through neglect, kill it. The gift was given but its health and future are largely up to us.

So how do we grow our faith?

More Answers Than I Know

I have read enough over the years to know that there are at least as many answers to the question of how to grow our faith as there are people who have wrestled with the question. We all know the basics of what one can do: read scripture, pray diligently, go to Mass, participate in the Sacraments, become part of Parish life, take on ministries in your community and so on.

But from an early age I have been interested in how things work, and when I think of how to grow faith, I find myself imagining an anatomy of faith.

Please notice that I said I imagine an anatomy, not the anatomy. What I offer here is a variant of what physicists call a “thought experiment”—a way of exploring something that is not necessarily mathematically rigorous or experimentally observed. The results of such abstract exercises can lead to physical experiments or rigorous mathematics, but the beginning is thinking in order to illuminate a subject.

Beliefs, Understanding, And Trust

When I think about growing my faith, I find it helps to break it into three areas than I can work on: beliefs, understanding and trust. These three elements may not be all that make up faith, but they are elements I can think about and, to some extent, work on.

For our purposes at the moment I want to define beliefs as a list of those things we accept as true with respect to our faith. The Creeds are good starter lists; the Catechism of the Catholic Church is an exhaustive one. People being as various as we are, the conviction behind that acceptance may vary here and there, but it isn’t difficult to find descriptions of the beliefs that form our Catholic faith.

An understanding of the items on the list is another part of faith. This may be the easiest to grow. We increase it by increasing our knowledge of the elements of our beliefs. There are countless books, classes, events, and personal interactions through which we grow our understanding. And there is always more to understand – including developing an awareness of what can never be grasped by our mortal minds.

Trust is the third component, and for me, at least, it is the most problematic with respect to growth.

The Difficulties Of Growing Trust

We can be intellectually convinced that something can be trusted, but our emotions may lag behind out minds.

Five hours west of the Grand Canyon National Park, the Hualapai people built a horseshoe-shaped bridge with a glass walkway called Skywalk. Visitors can walk out on the bridge and look directly down at the Colorado River in the floor of the canyon, between 500 and 800 feet below. The structure is well engineered and over a million visitors have walked along it.

But when it comes to taking those first steps, some people find that engineering diagrams and stress analysis don’t quite quiet the butterflies fluttering about in their stomachs, especially knowing that stomach butterflies are a remarkably inadequate substitute for a parachute or someone on the other end of a rope on belay.

Stroll along the walkway a few times and your confidence may build, allowing you to be blasé about stepping out over a 500 ft drop. But it may take some practice and repetition.

This is the difference between belief/understanding and trust. The former can be grown intellectually; the latter requires practice and experience.

How Trust Is Grown

Difficulty trusting is founded in fear. We grow our trust the same way doctors help people fight phobias: in small increments.

A therapist will counsel an agoraphobic – essentially a person afraid of leaving the house – to step outside and continue to walk until they are one step away from not being able to stand it.  With every exposure to the outside, patients find it possible to walk further and further.

Trust is rather like this. We can start with smaller things and build our trust incrementally.

Giving to the church is one area – people often fear that giving “too much” will put them in jeopardy, not trusting God to provide for them. The answer is to start small, perhaps 2% or 3% of income, and build year by year until we reach the biblical tithe.

Responding to God’s promptings is the same. Start by trusting the inner voice that comes from God and allow the positive results over time to build more and more trust. This makes God’s promptings easier to hear…and gives us the trust to respond to greater and more difficult promptings.

The same approach is possible for every element of our lives – to pray more, start by praying some. Increase your times and numbers of days over time. Use the same approach to reading scripture, for study, or doing volunteer work. Whatever fear holds us back from more can be met by starting with something.

Obedience

There is a direct and essential connection between building trust and obedience. The things that scripture commands and the church teaches are clear and fairly easy to learn about. Notice that the examples above all involve obedience to scriptural injunctions or teachings of the church. We learn these things by becoming well acquainted with our beliefs and by increasing our understanding of those beliefs; these are the things we can reliably build our trust in.

There is a section of Huckleberry Finn where Huck puts what he is being taught about prayer by Miss Watson to the test by praying for fishhooks. He is disappointed when a supply of fishhooks does not somehow magically appear for him. So he dismisses the power of prayer. But he is discarding the – not entirely accurate – correction that one is to pray for spiritual gifts, for which he sees no particular need.

This is an illustration of bad teaching combined with naiveté (and an author with an axe to grind). Even so, it is a valid warning for those desiring to grow their faith by increasing their trust. We must confine our efforts in obedience to what we know to be trustworthy because of its source, not out of our desires or wishes.

Remember That God Welcomes Us

Venturing forth in trust can be frightening. This world has instilled fear of abandonment and betrayal into so many of us that such fears are hardly surprising. That is one reason why some of us need to work at growing our faith more than others.

When we begin to grow our faith we may face obstacles both internal and external, but taking those problems to God in prayer will eventually cause them to yield before you. We are more likely to make progress initially and then face dryness and obstacles later on as we become more mature.

But it is important to remember that God’s love and mercy are infinite and that he really does love us and longs to bring us into a closer relationship with him. But he is not an impatient or prideful human father. He welcomes what we have to give and gives what we are open to receive in order to draw us closer, healing our wounds and quieting our fears. It is the enemy who prowls about seeking someone to devour; God is the Good Shepherd, welcoming us into the safety of his flock.

“Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for yourselves. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light” [Matthew 11: 28-30].