“Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” – Hebrews 11:1
“Help me to understand more about faith,” I asked the Lord as I sat looking out the window. Like showing me a picture, He reminded me of a scene from my life several years earlier.
I was pregnant with our second child. It had been a difficult pregnancy as I was in a wheelchair due to severe rheumatoid arthritis. Many times, in prayer I had given the baby to the Lord. Then, seven weeks before my due date, I began hemorrhaging. I thought that the baby had died. My sister came and took my four-year-old son to her house. As I sat alone waiting for my husband to come home from work and for the ambulance to arrive and take us to the hospital, I began to cry almost hysterically. Then suddenly I stopped and said, “Lord, I have given this baby to You; he is Yours.” Instantly, I felt a calm and peace come over me. It stayed with me when the ambulance arrived and while all the little neighbor kids came out to watch the “show.” The next day, when the baby’s heart was in distress and the doctors decided to do an emergency Cesarean section, I still had peace.
When I woke up from surgery, I did not have to ask if the baby was okay, I already knew he was. I did not even think about how amazing that was until the day, many years later, when I asked the Lord to help me understand faith better. He showed me that when I surrendered to Him even though I could not see the end result, that was faith. It was as though the evidence was already before me.
Today, my son is a six-foot-one-inch tall young man. You would never guess that he was a preemie or that he ever gave his mom a moment of worry about his health. God is so good!