A Ramble About Muscles and Faith

I was out using a hoe on my front lawn today. The roto-tiller's broken for the moment, so if we want to get a garden in this year, my back and arms have to fill in for gas powered machinery. I have a feeling that our garden will be smaller this year than last for that reason.

I used to have a fair amount of muscle on me. A few years ago I worked unloading trucks for a Wal-Mart in Southern California. But that was a few years ago. I haven't done anything nearly that physically demanding since, partly because I hurt my back doing it (it involved a coworker, a pallet, and a backflip on my part; I was later told it was quite the sight). As a result, my arms and back aren't what they were.

I started hoeing the new plot for the garden yesterday. I worked for about twenty minutes before I had to quit because my back was hating me. Today I tried to at least finish what I started yesterday. I think I got a little more done, but not by much. My arms and back were already screaming at me from yesterday and they weren't too keen on it today.

I learned from when I started unloading trucks that this kind of conflict is, in many ways, mind over body. No matter how much your body is telling you it's being tortured, you have to just ignore it and keep going. It will, many days hence, get easier and you'll be able to do it for longer periods of time. When I started unloading trucks, I thought fifty pounds was heavy. When I left Wal-Mart, I could lift nearly one-fifty to two hundred. I learned that in order to really build muscle and build strength, you have to stretch and tear the muscle a little at a time. It hurts. It makes you sore for hours after the exercise has stopped. It exhausts you. In the end, though, it strengthens you to where you could carry loads you never could before.

The opposite is also true. If you don't use the muscle you've got, you lose the use of it. Over the last year or so I've done more sitting down (due to my back) than has been good for my muscles. As a result, when I actually tried using what had been there before, they screamed bloody murder at me.

Faith is a lot like our muscles. In order for it to grow, it has to be stretched and torn a bit as it's exercised. In order for it to build up, it has to be pushed to its breaking point and exhausted. In order for our faith to be maintained, it has to be exercised regularly and consistently at the level of exercise which it has been conditioned for. If we don't use it, it begins to disappear so that when we are called on to use it, our mind and fears scream bloody murder at us.


Faith becomes too easily flaccid when we buy into the illusions of security with which we surround ourselves. To put it another way, our faith in the unchanging God begins to die when we put our faith in changeable things we can see, hear, and touch. We stop believing that we need to depend on Him and begin the mistaken belief that we can depend on something else.


When we put our faith in a large bank account, it create the illusion that we don't need to depend on Him (ask the modern Greeks how that's currently working for them; they're staring down the barrel of all of their money becoming worthless overnight). When we depend on the works of our own hands, what happens if those hands can no longer work? When we depend on a government, what happens if that government falls, or decides it's no longer in their interests to help you?

If you ask God to grow or increase your faith, it's likely that He'll allow all kinds of "bad" things to happen in your life: job loss, illness, death of a loved one, and other problems. Each of these is the removal of the illusion that you were trusting in for your security. It's a fly or fall, sink or swim proposition. Either you turn to Him and learn to trust Him, or you don't. You learn very quickly whether or not you had faith in Him to begin with. God is pleased to help us to exercise our faith and indeed He wants us to grow closer to Him through it, but that doesn't mean it's any more of a pleasant process than extreme body-building. You have to be trained to carry heavier and still heavier loads by faith alone and not by what you can see. It is torturous at times, but necessary.

I know I've got to work the garden plot a little at a time to recondition my muscles. I also know that if I don't, it won't get planted, and my muscles will continue to grow weaker to where when I need them they won't be there. My faith in Him is the same way.