From Belief to Faith
Compassion and Faith
Reflection By Robbin Brent
Faith is taking the first step even when you can’t see the whole stairway.
- The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
During his service in the military, my youngest son was part of two airborne divisions, which meant he often was required to jump out of aircraft and descend at a very quick clip in order to avoid being detected. The army has a formula for how many feet per second a soldier can drop and still land (mostly) intact. It is very fast. In order to do this, he first had to believe that his parachute would keep him safe, and then he had to place his faith in it by jumping. This is one of the distinctions between belief and faith. I might believe that parachutes work, but would not put my faith in one by jumping out of an airplane. He believed and then acted out of his belief. That is faith.
Both faith and compassion are used together many hundreds of times throughout Scripture to describe great love, deeply felt and then expressed through acts of steadfast lovingkindness, mercy, goodness, and faithfulness. As Dr. King expressed so well in the quote above, while we often have no idea of the ways in which our compassion matters, we are called to have faith that we are the visible heart and arms of God at work in the world. We make a commitment to act on our belief in a God of love, trusting that even when we don’t, God knows where we are going.
It is our faith in God, expressed through our willingness to act on what we believe, that prepares our minds and hearts to respond compassionately to suffering, our own, others, and the world’s.
Making it Personal: How do you experience the relationship between your beliefs, your faith, and your ability to respond compassionately? Jesus is just one example from Scripture of someone who remained true to his beliefs by living a life of faithfulness and compassion. Can you think of others? How might they inspire your own journey of faith?